Jane dreamed of Nick, the love of her life, a good and vivid dream, tactile as dreams rarely were, his hand on her throat, her breast, a kiss bestowed on her bare shoulder, his face radiant in the amber half-light and fluid shadows of a nameless place, and she enraptured not by desire but by a sense of safety in his arms.
But then, when he spoke, her expectation that his words would be those of her love and lover was not fulfilled, and he possessed instead the hateful voice of the man who, two months earlier, had met and charmed Travis and had later threatened Jane by phone: “He’s a wonderfully trusting child, and so very tender. Sheerly for the fun of it, we could pack the little bugger off to some third-world snake pit, turn him over to a group like ISIS or Boko Haram….” Nick’s tender touch had become rough, and when she tried to pull away from him, he held her fast. “Some of those badasses are as fond of little boys as much as they are of little girls….” His eyes were no longer Nick’s eyes, but viperous and cold. “He might be passed around until he’s ten or eleven before some barbarian tires of him and finally cuts off his pretty head.”
In a sweat, she sat up from the dream and could not turn the lights on fast enough, fumbling with one bedside lamp and then the other. Though she was alone, she drew the pistol from under the pillow on which Nick’s head would have rested if he had been alive and with her.
According to the digital clock, it was 4:08 A.M.
She would sleep no more this night.
The wind had escorted the rain to another part of the world. There was not even traffic noise from the street nor any sound from an adjacent motel room, the Southern California hive now stilled in anticipation of the dawn.
She had been propelled awake not by the fact that the dream became a nightmare, but by a realization that had eluded her when awake yet had come to her in sleep. Nick had been intelligent and tough-minded, with a profound sense of responsibility to his family. And yet…having been identified by the computer model as a candidate for the Hamlet list, having been at some point injected with a control mechanism, having been directed to self-destruct, he had done it. Therefore, what if instead he’d been directed to commit murder-suicide, as this woman in Minnesota had done?
What if Nick had been told to slaughter his wife and child before taking his own life?
That was a what-if on which she refused to dwell.
With the pistol in hand, she thrust up from the creaking bed and navigated the room as if hidden traps lay everywhere about to spring. In the bathroom, she turned on the light and swept aside the lime-scaled shower curtain, certain that no one waited there, but nonetheless compelled to look. She put the gun on the laminate top of the vanity and cranked on the cold water and cupped her hands and pressed her face into the bowl of palms and fingers, as though to wash away the tormenting what-if.
Watching the clear beads drip off her face and spatter against the chipped porcelain sink, she could too easily imagine they were drops of blood.
The trouble with the what-if game was that once you began to play it, you couldn’t just quit whenever you wanted. From one what-if grew another.
In some future confrontation, what if they captured her and injected a control mechanism? What if then they told her to return to her little boy and kill him and then kill herself? Or what if they told her to kill him but not herself, to live thereafter with the knowledge of what she had done to him after he had rushed into her embrace?
She had thought she understood all that was at risk. But the poets and the sages agreed that Hell had several levels; and she had just glimpsed a deeper stratum than those she had seen before.