“How did you sleep this week?”
“The same.”
“Still having the nightmares about dinosaurs?”
“Of course.”
“Which one?”
“All of them?”
“Why do you insist on starting like this?”
“Because it’s a waste of time.”
“Yet, you keep coming back?”
“I can’t stop picking my nose either.”
She did not think it was as funny as he did.
“Fine. I dreamed the one about the friend I lost when Portland was taken. I can see the city but it’s like … like it’s a ghost. You can see right through it. It was like that just before they bombed it. My friends and I were out of town when it happened, and when we headed back to Portland it wasn’t there anymore. We never did find our homes again. In fact, all we found in the Portland quilt was a lot of trouble. That’s where I met my first dinosaur. But we never found Portland. It had just disappeared! Except, every once in a while we could see it shimmering in the distance like a mirage. The city was coming and going, like it was trying to get back from wherever it went. Portland is like that in my dream. I can see people in the city, standing in the streets; men, women, and children, and they’re trying to get out but they can’t. There is some kind of invisible barrier stopping them.
My friend is there in the front, pounding his fists on the barrier, begging me to help him, but every time I reach out for him, my hand passes right through him like he’s made of smoke. All of the people are like that, like they are ghosts.”
“Why do you call them ghosts?”
“I didn’t say they were ghosts, I said they were like ghosts.”
“Ghosts are the spirits of the dead.”
“What’s your point?”
“Did you do the homework I assigned you?”
“I left high school behind ten years ago. Actually, it left me—gone like everything and everyone in Portland and fifty cities around the world. Believe it or not, I still have the last homework assignment Mr. Landers ever assigned. It’s an essay on my biggest personal challenge and how I overcame it. I’ve been thinking of rewriting it.”
He laughed. She waited for him to stop, that annoying blank look on her face.
“Yes, I did what you asked. I knew all of it anyway.”
“What did you find?”
Exasperated, he sighed. She would not give up until he recited.
“Scientists call what happened to the planet a ‘time quilt.’ Nuclear testing back in the fifties and sixties caused it. When they started testing hydrogen fusion bombs, the megatonnage was enough to create tiny black holes. The black holes created ripples in the fabric of time that radiated into the past and future. Wherever the ripples intersected, things and people dropped through holes in time. That explains why history records bizarre events like people suddenly vanishing, frogs mysteriously falling out of the sky and even explains spontaneous human combustion.”
He stopped, looking directly at her.
“Did you know that all of this was discovered by a college kid? He based his theory on the work of Zorastrus, an ancient prophet.”
“Tell me the rest,” she said patiently.
“Eventually all of the little ripples converged to make a
few super waves and when these intersected it created a huge temporal rift and our time and the Cretaceous period collided. That’s why dinosaurs are grazing on golf courses and decimating the elk herds.”
“What else did you find?”
He hated her when she was like this. A plump woman, gray hair tied in a tight bun, wearing a pinstriped business suit, she looked like a high school teacher. With bookshelves lining two of her walls, her office felt like the school library—not that he had spent much time there.
“No one knows for sure what happened to the people who disappeared. Most scientists think they were displaced into the future.”
“Where they are alive, right?”
“Some think so.”
“Some?”
“All right, most think so. But they’re not sure about the people in Portland because that was where the president decided to try and fix the whole mess by detonating a hundred warheads. It didn’t work.”
“It stopped further time disruption.”
He did not say anything. He sensed where she was going with this and he did not want to go there.
“You said there were people inside Portland with your friend. Did you recognize any of them?”
“No.”
“None of them?”
“I said, ‘no.’”
“Were your friend’s parents there?”
“Maybe. Sometimes in my dream I can see his dad’s church. There are people in front of it. They might be his parents.”
“You don’t recognize anyone else?”
“No.”
“Your father isn’t there?”
“No,” he said too quickly.
Now she waited. She used silence as a weapon; a battering ram that knocked down his resistance. He held out, letting minutes pass.
“Close your eyes,” she said finally. “I’m going to guide you through your dream. Maybe I can help you identify some of the people you are seeing.”
“Forget it. I don’t believe in hypnosis.”
“We’ve done this before, and you know it is not hypnosis.”
He gave in.
“You don’t have to guide me. The son-of-a-bitch is there.”
“Who?”
“My father! That’s what you were fishing for.”
“And he’s asking for you to help him?”
“No. He’s the only one not asking me for help. All of them—my friend, strangers, my friend’s parents—everyone is asking me to save them. They want me to get them back from wherever it is they ended up. Believe me, wherever they are, they don’t want to be there.”
“But not your father?”
“No.”
“He likes it there when no one else does?”
“No. He wants to get back, too!”
“But he is the only one not asking for help. Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know, but last night I dreamed about the one-eyed tyrannosaur again. That dream scares the shit out of me. In the dream, he has both of his eyes and he has me and a friend trapped under a log. His huge jaws are snapping at us.”
“We’ve talked about that dream. You weren’t under that log, your friends were. You had left them. They put an arrow in its eye and got away.”
“I didn’t leave them! We were separated! I would have helped them if I had known what was happening. Those two were helpless without me and I’m not the kind of guy who abandons a buddy in trouble.”
He was half out of his chair. Now he settled back, realizing he was nearly shouting. Her face was as impassive as ever.
“Let’s finish with the other dream first,” she said.
“You know, we never discussed my dream about the little old lady and her pet dinosaur,” he said, his breathing returning
to normal. “She fed it sugar from her apartment window and turned it into a pet.”
“You saw that re-created in a television movie. It happened at the edge of the New York time quilt, not in Portland, and you’ve never been to New York.”
“But in my dream I killed her pet dinosaur.”
“Her iguanodon was killed by members of a street gang, not you.”
“Not in my dream. I shoot it right between the eyes and then she comes hobbling across the meadow, crying, and lies down next to the iguanodon and dies of a broken heart. Shouldn’t we talk about that dream?”
Now she drew the silence weapon again. He looked at her book titles. Complete Works of Anna Freud, Love and Guilt, Postmodern Therapies in the New World. She was still using the weapon. He looked past her and out the window. An apatosaur strolled by, ignoring the occupants of the building. He got up and walked to the large window that made up one wall of her office. She rotated in her chair, watching him. The window looked out into the Portland Preserve, which was supervised by the National Park Service and their dinosaur rangers. A half dozen apatosaurs grazed the perimeter near the fence line. With no predators in the preserve, the apatosaurs had grown careless; none were keeping watch.
“This is why I picked you,” he said. “If I have to be in a city, I don’t want to be any deeper than this.”
“That’s flattering.”
He had not offended her and he ignored the remark.
“Why isn’t your father asking for help?” she probed again.
He stared into the meadow but now he was seeing the dream.
“When I was nine, I played Little League baseball. My dad was a big baseball fan. I was small for my age then, and not very good. When they had to let me play, they always stuck me in right field—little kids can’t hit to right. My dad liked to stand behind the plate, coaching me, telling me to ‘knock it out of the park.’ I remember my last time at bat. I
swung at the first two balls and missed. Then Dad said, ‘Wait for a good one.’ I let the next one go. It was right down the middle. As I walked away from the plate he said, ‘You’ll never be worth nuthin.’ I never played again.”
Now he went back to his chair, slumping, settling deep into the soft leather.
“In the dream, my father isn’t asking for help because he thinks there’s nothing I can do to help him. He thinks I’m worthless.”
There was silence again, but it wasn’t a weapon this time. It was medicine.
“So you went your own way,” she suggested.
“I’m very good at what I do.”
“You’re a killer.”
He smiled, then shrugged.
“Yes, but I’m very good at it. Dad would be proud.”