Back at home, Marko could see that his mom was in a bad mood. She didn’t talk much and kept staring off while Marko tried to talk to her. He asked her if she wanted to watch some baseball with him and she said sure. But then Marko was watching baseball by himself on his iPad and she was sitting next to him staring at the wall. After a while, Marko paused the game he was watching.
“You okay?” he asked her. She looked at him and didn’t say anything.
“Do you want to use the dream bed?” she asked.
Marko nodded, stunned.
“You’d rather use the dream bed than watch baseball?”
Marko was unsure how to proceed. He wanted to use the dream bed more than anything. But he didn’t want to act too eager either. Usually, nothing could be more desirable than baseball on the iPad.
“What kind of dreams have you had in there?” his mom asked. Marko shrugged. He couldn’t decide what to tell her.
“I apologize for what happened when I caught you in there. I wanted to destroy the thing. It’s just those headaches you’ve been having and a superstition someone told me about that thing and how it could possibly even do harm. There’s that risk. Anyway, I wish you would have asked first.”
“Sorry.”
“I built it with the help of a woman I met at the ashram. She’s a shaman. She gave me the directions to build it and gave me the materials, which she blessed. She told me it would do one of two things, either past life regression or what’s called shamanic journeying. The latter is what has happened to me. It’s basically a state of vivid, lucid dreaming that reveals something important to me about myself. Each time has been pretty intense for me. That’s why I’m very curious to know what it’s been like for you.”
Marko wondered if he were dreaming right then. The quality of what she just shared with him was 73 percent more personal than anything she’d ever shared before. “I don’t know. It just relaxes me,” he said. She squinted at him.
“I’ve had dreams of being someone else. Someone older who can walk.” Marko exhaled. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath. Her eyes widened and filled with fear. She leaned forward and grabbed his arm.
“Are you regressing? If it’s a past life, people you encounter there would possibly look familiar to you. You would come back with knowledge from your past life that could be dangerous.”
“Why dangerous?”
“She told me that regressing takes a toll, whether physically or emotionally. She told me that there was a man she made a dream bed for who started having chest pains after he came back from a regression. He came back knowing what his past self knew, she said, and it aged his heart. The man started coughing all the time. He went to the doctor and they did a scan and found out that his heart was enlarged and leaking fluid into his lungs. He had been totally healthy! So they put him on medication. He got better for a while. But then he went back in the dream bed and had a heart attack!”
Marko’s hands were going.
“There are other stories, Marko. A woman who went mad. Another woman who got very depressed then just disappeared. It’s not a joke.”
Marko didn’t realize he’d been smiling. It wasn’t the sad stories about the people that pleased him. It was his mom’s deep and palpable concern for him.
“Have you noticed anything? Any new pain in your body after going in? Any depression or dark thoughts?”
There was the fear in her eyes again. Now he understood. She was worried about what the dream bed was taking from him in exchange for what it gave. Marko thought of the dark body and how it seemed to get more powerful and closer to him each time he travelled to Emil. Also, he’d been having headaches a lot, especially when he read.
“No, nothing like that,” he said. She looked relieved and he knew he’d said the right thing. “Can I go in there now?”
His mom was calm when she answered, which surprised him. “Yes, but I should tell you that your grandmother knows about the dream bed now. She saw it that day and even though I put her off, she knew what it was. The shaman who gave me the plans lives at the Ashram with Grandma and they know each other. Grandma knows the stories. Now, she’s threatening to try to get custody of you because she says I left you alone and allowed you to put yourself in danger. She doesn’t believe in what the shaman does, she calls it nonsense, yet it seems it scares her to know you’re doing it.”
Marko leaned closer to his mom and grabbed her arm and clung to it. It worried him very much to think of having to be with his grandma 100 percent of the time. Dark green cubes of fear clunked painfully through his head.
“It’ll be okay,” his mom said, seeing that she’d scared him. “She won’t follow through with this. The only thing is, now that she’s started this, we’re going to have to go through it. Grandma told me she knows a counselor that she wants to have you talk to. So that might happen, a counselor might come over and ask you questions and ask me questions.”
Marko gripped her arm harder.
“All you have to do is tell the truth. I won’t ask you to say anything you don’t think is true,” she said.
“What do I have to say to stay with you?” he asked. She smiled and pushed his hair back from his forehead.
“The truth,” she said. He could tell she was lying.
Marko decided to go into the dream bed one last time, then ask her to get rid of it. If it were there when the counselor person came, they wouldn’t be able to deny its existence, which is what Marko knew he had to do. He got in his chair and wheeled into her room. He locked the wheels. He looked behind him, but she wasn’t coming. She disappeared into the kitchen. He closed the door to her bedroom and climbed to the floor.
He woke in Emil’s body, knowing it right away by the sore feet. He was in the cot in his small room in the dormitory and he was alone. On the small desk was the novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Ambassador had given it to him. He opened it and fanned the pages. The same dog-eared pages and underlined passages were there as the ones he knew from his mom’s copy of the book. He placed the book back on the desk and sat on the bed. On the floor, tucked under the bed and peeking out, were metal contraptions. He pulled them out and saw that they were flexible braces for his feet and ankles. He fit his feet into them and put his shoes on over them, marveling again at the ease of doing this. He stood and walked out of the room. With the braces on, he found his feet hurt less. The braces held his feet in place, not allowing them to turn in and walk on the sorest places. He walked through the corridor and out into the sunlit courtyard. The air was humid and hot. Before he completed ten paces, he was already sweating.
He eventually found the rutted road and followed it, but it ended abruptly, giving way to a footpath into the forest. Even though he knew it wasn’t the way back to the Ambassador’s office, he had the urge to explore it, so he went. The path reminded him of a time he had gone camping with his mother and grandmother. They stayed in a cabin, one of a dozen or so, clustered around a corner of a lake. Many times a day, whenever his mom went out looking for kindling, or off to the deer blind, or down to the dock or to the beach, she took Marko along, pushing his off-road wheelchair over the dirt paths, rough with rocks and roots, that wound around the camp.
Now here he was in Thailand as Emil, walking with a stiff-legged gait along a similar path, having a memory of Marko’s life that would take place in the future.
A stream ran to the right of him. The path curved close to the water, then climbed above it. In places it rose steeply. He had to pick his way across rocks and over fallen limbs. Sometimes the trail became less than obvious, and he’d have to decide whether to go this way or that. When he’d gone about a mile he realized he didn’t know what he’d do if he fell and couldn’t go on. But compared to how impossible this hike would have been for him as Marko, he felt invincible as Emil. He went on, sweating and with throbbing feet.
He was high above the stream by the time the path looped around, turning back the way he had come. He felt better knowing he’d begun closing the distance between himself and Grafton. If he began to fall, he doubted he’d be able to catch himself. He gave himself up to what might happen. He noticed his worries, just as his mom had taught him, and did not let them take over. As Emil, he saw—as he never had seen as Marko—that doing so only robbed himself of the pleasure his experience might otherwise offer. It was as though his mother were there with him as Emil, leading all three of them through the forest.
He finished his walk and it was lovely: the rushing stream, the little mushrooms as orange as salamanders, the mistiness of the woods. When he emerged, he found himself back where he started, drenched in sweat. Unsure of which way to turn, he returned to his room to rest and cool off.
As he was walking up the narrow hallway toward his door, Marko saw him. The Ambassador. He was flanked by two other men. As he got closer he saw that they were police officers, and he knew that the Ambassador was in trouble.
“Emil, I just came to tell you that I’ll be leaving soon. I wanted to make sure you got your braces and I see that you have.” There was his mouth, his chipped tooth. Marko felt a shiver go through him and he hugged himself. The Ambassador’s eyes were pleading, heavy. Marko couldn’t make sense of it.
“What happened? Where are you going?”
The Ambassador didn’t answer. He just dropped his gaze to the floor and turned away. Marko wanted to grab him and pull him back. He had the same sense that he had when his mom walked away from him while he wanted her attention. Frantically, he looked for a way to keep him there. He saw the novel on his desk and picked it up.
“Ambassador,” he called and walked after Todor and the officers. The Ambassador stopped and turned. He looked ten years older than he had just a moment ago. The skin around his mouth and chin seemed to sag with new weight. Marko handed him the book. He took it and smiled. Even his smile was a frown. Then he was gone.
A sharp pain shot through Marko’s head and he fell to the floor. He woke up screaming in the dream bed, his head so full of pressure he was sure it would explode. He felt himself being dragged out. He tried to open his eyes but his head hurt too much. Under the sound of his own cries, he heard his grandmother’s voice, and then his mom’s. They were yelling. He heard a loud crack and opened his eyes. Another bolt of pain shot through his head as he saw his mom, in a rage, smashing the dream bed apart with the hammer. The dark body swallowed him and he was gone.