The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (5 page)

“The dahlias out front.
Did you plant them?”

Marco, who’d been very
accommodating up to now, suddenly wasn’t. “Yes?”

“The red one fascinates
me. Was it intentional, or a mistake?”

“The dahlias,” he said
firmly, “are no one’s business.”

Okay…

He walked over to another
photo. “Do you know what the tragedy of her work is?”

“The tragedy?”

“She’ll never be able to
see it. People tell her it’s beautiful—she can never see how
beautiful it is.”

“How does she work? How
does she actually
do
this?”

“By
feel
.”

The voice came from
behind. I turned to see an attractive middle-age woman with
prematurely white hair that reached down to her shoulders. She was
wearing a pair of faded overalls and had the soft straight-ahead
stare of unseeing eyes. Her hair was fluffy yet stringy, like
cotton balls had been growing out of her scalp and somebody had
clawed at them until they stretched to her shoulders.

“I can
feel
the light. I have a very
powerful feeling for light. I move the camera around until I can
feel the light at its strongest. That’s when I know I have a
shot.”

Marco told her I was Quinn
McShane.

“And you’re a journalist?”
she said. It wasn’t
quite
an accusation.

“That’s me.”

“We can talk in the study.
Marco, I think we’ll be fine.”

“Just remember, we have an
11:30.”

I’ve interviewed people in
all kinds of places, drug houses lit by candlelight, gone-bust
shacks with no electricity. Doesn’t matter—I’ve never worked a room
as dark as Georgiana Copely’s study. All the blinds were drawn, all
the windows shuddered against sunlight. She sat at a desk lit by a
stained-glass lamp that gave off as much light as an aquarium tank.
As my pupils dilated she slowly seemed to materialize
again.

“So,” she said, “a story
on Wooly Cornell.” Her tone: Artic indifference.

“A story on
Wooly.”

“About?”

“He’s been having some
troubles.”

“I’m sorry, I assumed you
were
investigating
him.”

“Just trying to tell a
story. I know there’s been a touch of hostility between
you.”

“Not my fault,” said
Georgiana. “He’s a
pig
. He overstepped the line between collector and pain in the
ass. He turned greedy and obnoxious and I told him off.”

“Any interest in
revenge?”

“Not particularly. He’s
got to live with himself, which in and of itself is punishment
enough.”

“Apparently not.
Somebody’s fired shots at him twice.”

“And missed?
Pity.”

“Cold.”

“So you’re here because I
told him he was going to die.”

“Not something you hear
every day.”

“And you think, what?
I
hired
someone
to make the prediction come to pass?”

“I’m not
thinking
it. I’m
asking
it.”

“I wouldn’t waste my
money.”

I shifted in my seat,
angling for a better position. “Why did you tell him he was going
to die?”

“I told him what I
saw.”

“Through one of
your…”

“You can call them
visions. It’s not offensive.”

“These
visions
, are they related to your
photography? They have anything to do with the feel of
light?”

Georgiana paused, looking
at my voice. “I’m not sure. I know they didn’t start when I lost my
sight. They started after.”

“How?”

Long silence.

“After the death of my
son,” she said. “He was being taken to school. There was a
collision, an auto accident…”

“How old was
he?”

“Six.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you have
children?”

“I have a
daughter.”

“Then maybe you can
understand. Maybe you can begin to grasp the grief, the pain. I
thought I was going to lose my mind. And maybe I did. At the
funeral, I’d placed a photo of him next to the coffin. During the
mass, I thought I could see something. I thought I could see an
aura of light coming from where I knew his photograph
was.”

“You could
feel
it?”

“I could
see
it. It was just on
the periphery of my visual field, just a halo of smoke. And no
matter how I turned my head the image wouldn’t go away. I thought
it was a form of grief-hysteria, some optical pathology. But after
a few days it went away. And that’s when the visions began. That
day, that’s when they started. Sudden eruptions. Sudden explosions
of images or memories. Bleed-throughs, they’re called.”

“Memories? The past and
the future?”

“I have no control over
what I see. In my work I do. In the visions, no.”

“So what you told Wooly,
you didn’t
will
it.”

“In his case, I wish I
had. I’ve never met a more disgusting human being in my life. I’ll
buy another photo if you give me another tip? The
balls
to say that! He’s
a fat, disgusting bastard. Even a
blind
person can see the bile stains
on his soul.”

“Maybe there’re things
about him you don’t know.”

“Why the hell would
I
want
to? He’s a
fat, smelly, despicable bastard. Trying to buy me off? Like I’m
a
whore
? If I
want to know anything about him I’ll read it in his
obitu—.”

And then it happened. As
those last words were leaving her mouth the whole right side of her
body began to spasm and jerk. Her cheek, shoulder, arm—everything
was rippling with convulsions. The terror in her eyes was
completely out of control. She looked like someone who’d just been
pushed out of a plane 15,000 feet above the ground.

I jumped up—I had no idea
what the fuck was going on. She reached out and grabbed the desk to
hold herself up. Her mouth was moving like she was trying to form
words but nothing was coming out. I half-turned to call Marco. She
was having an epileptic fit or a heart attack. Her long white hair
was shaking like a mop and the veins on her forehead were about to
blow apart from dilation.

>>>>>>

Then the tremors stopped.
They just stopped. They’d lasted, I don’t know, seven seconds,
eight, though it felt like they’d gone on for three days. She was
quiet now, hands still on the desk, though when she lifted her head
and looked at me, it was different. It was like she could actually
see me now and her sight was so sharp it was burning the
air.

“Are you all
right?”

Her hands moved, rubbed
the wood of the desk. “It’s raining.”

“It’s what?”

“It’s raining. Heavy,
heavy downpour. It’s raining and people are leaving you. Two
people.”

Her voice was low but
steady, like she making an intense confession.

“Two people?”

“You can’t see them, but
you know they’re leaving. You can’t see them because you’re
standing far away.”

Jesus H.—she was trying to
pull some psychic shit on me.

“Where am I
standing?”

“You’re standing behind
cement.” She was concentrating, almost squinting. It was like she
was trying to read the fine print. “”You’re surrounded by cement.
That’s why you can’t see them, but you know they’re leaving. It’s
raining and you know they’re going away.”

I felt a tightness in my
throat, a sad tension. I remembered. I was up in Red Mountain
Correctional, early in my term. It was raining hard outside. It was
October 18, and I realized this was the day my wife and daughter
were moving to Arizona. She’d told me—we’re leaving New York on
October 18. I was standing in my cell, realizing what day it was,
realizing this was the last day the three of us would officially
live together. And it was raining hard, cannonball heavy. It was
like the ocean was falling outside.

I didn’t know what was
going on here. I felt like I was gently drowning, like I was being
hypnotized. But not by her, because she looked hypnotized too. She
kept rubbing her hands on the desk, absently kneading the wood,
staring not at me but at some ghost light inside me.

I don’t know how she knew
about that day. I was running all kinds of scenarios through my
head, trying to explain it, but there was something here that
couldn’t be explained away.

Her hands stopped. They
stopped rubbing the wood. She let go of the desk and fell back in
the chair, suddenly looking very tired, the energy seeping out of
her like air from an untied balloon. It was over. Her eyes returned
to blind normal. Whatever had taken over her had passed. The world
had come back.

Four, five seconds went
by. Nothing. Silence.

“Are you okay?”

She thought for a moment
before answering. “Yes.”

“Do you need anything?
Water?”

She shook her head. “I’m
sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude on your private thoughts. I have no
right to do that.”

“It’s all right. I
guess.”

“I can’t help it, I’m
sorry. I have no control over these episodes. They just…come. They
just come out of nowhere. My body starts to tremble and I feel
this, this
pressure
come over me, falling over me. It just happens.”

I kept looking at her,
waiting five more seconds. “Once it happens, what does it feel
like?”

The question seemed to
throw her. She thought about it, her eyes straining as she searched
for words.

“It’s like being taken out
of time,” she said, “suddenly snatched out of time and space. It’s
like time and space don’t exist. It’s like living in a universe
without time and space, like the Big Bang never happened, and time
and space were never created.”

She felt the desk again,
as if looking for reassurance.

“Do you ever think about
the universe?” she said.

“All the time.”

She balled her right hand
in a fist. “You know what scientists say, right? At one point, just
a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was smaller
than a fist. Can you imagine that? The entire universe was smaller
than a human fist.”

I sat there, staring at
her closed hand. Neither of us said anything. It felt like we’d
been sitting in that room forever.

>>>>>>

FRIDAY JUNE 15, 10:47
a.m.

THE LAST DOOR

Getting out of the room,
getting out of the house, was like walking into the light. Yes, I
mean
that
light.
After the darkness and the psychic display, it was like a rebirth.
I felt like an initiate crawling into the dawn after a night in the
Delphic cave. I couldn’t believe how incredibly
real
everything outside looked. The
sky, the flowers, the trees hiding the house from the
road.

The vintage Jag, my rental
behind it, my open shoelace.

As I walked past the Jag,
I bent down to tie my shoe. By the time I stood up, I’d slipped a
GPS transmitter under the rear bumper of the XKE.

We have an
11:30
.

I parked a few blocks
away, not totally persuaded that Georgiana wasn’t playing some role
in the shootings. I thought about her, still wondering how she got
inside my memory, still trying to recover from the
experience.

At 11:10 my phone beeped.
The Jag was on the move. I called up the tracking screen, saw that
the car was leaving the house and heading southeast. Georgiana
could read my mind, I could read her direction—tit for
tat.

Three minutes later I
caught up with the XKE. It was about 200 feet in front of me,
Georgiana on the passenger’s side, Marco driving. I kept that
distance as they drove into town. They passed the Hidden Lake
Hotel, turned by the town’s tallest structure—a five-story office
building—and turned past the glorious splendor of the corner fried
chicken restaurant in the middle of downtown. A block beyond the
chicken joint Marco found a parking space and pulled in. I kept
going, made a quick U and found my own spot.

A lunch crowd was starting
to build on the streets, mixed in with a few early-arrival
tourists. But with the overalls and the long white hair, Georgiana
was easy to follow. She was wearing sunglasses, arm linked around
Marco’s. They were walking back the way they’d come—around the
chicken corner and down toward the office building. Hidden Lake
Executive Center it was called. A generically ugly building, not
even crappy in a unique and interesting way.