Dancing in Dreamtime (2 page)

After examining fibula, femur, sternum, and clavicle, each bone familiar yet slightly awry from the norm, I gingerly unpacked the plates of the skull. Their scattered state was unsettling enough, since in ordinary skeletal kits they would have come pre-assembled into a braincase. Their gathered state was even more unsettling. They would go together in only one arrangement, yet it appeared so outrageous to me that I reassembled the skull three times, always with the same result. There was only one jaw, to be sure, though an exceedingly broad one, and the usual pair of holes for ears. The skull itself, however, was clearly double, as if two
heads had been squeezed together, like cherries grown double on a single stem. Each hemisphere of the brain enjoyed its own cranium. The opening for the nose was in its accustomed place, as were two of the eyes. But in the center of the vast forehead, like the drain in a bare expanse of bathtub, was the cavity for a third eye.

I closed the anatomy text. Hunched over to shield this freak from the gaze of other students, I stared long at that triangle of eyes, and at the twinned craniums that splayed out behind like a fusion of moons. No, I decided, such a creature was not possible. It must be a counterfeit, like the Piltdown Man or the Cardiff Giant. But I would not fall for the trick. I dismantled the skull, stuffed the bones into their trays, clasped the box shut and returned it to the check-out desk.

“This may seem funny to you,” I hissed at the librarian, who was rooting in her bush of hair with the point of a pencil, “but I have an exam to pass.”

“Funny?” she whispered.

“This hoax.” I slapped the box, raising a puff of dust.

“Not so loud, please.”

“It's a fabrication.”

“Is it?” She rested her gloved hands atop the crate.

“Nobody who knows a scrap of anatomy would fall for it.”

“Really?” she said, peeling the glove away from one wrist. I wanted to hurry away before she could uncover that hand. Yet I was caught by the slide of cloth, the sight of pink skin emerging. “I found it hard to believe myself, at first,” she said, spreading the naked hand before me, palm up. I was relieved to count only five digits. But the fleshy heel was inflamed, as if the bud of a new thumb were sprouting there. A scar, only a scar, I thought. Nothing
more. Whereupon she turned the hand over and displayed another palm. The fingers curled upward and then curled in the reverse direction, forming a cage of fingers on the counter.

I flinched, and turned my gaze aside, unwilling to look her in the eye, fearful of what those snarled bangs might hide. Skeletons were shattering in my mind, names of bones were fluttering away like blown leaves.

“How many of you are there?” I whispered.

“I'm the first, so far as I know. Unless you count our friend here.” She clacked her nails on the bone-box.

I guessed the distances to inhabited planets. “Where do you come from?”

“Boise.”

“Boise . . . Idaho?”

“Actually, I grew up in a logging camp out in the sticks, but Boise's the nearest place anybody's ever heard of.”

“You mean you're . . .”

“Human? Of course!” She loosed a quiet laugh. Students glanced up momentarily from their skeletons with glassy eyes. The librarian lowered her voice, until it burbled like whale song. “At least I started out that way,” she whispered.

“But what about your hands? Your face?”

“Until a few months ago they were just ordinary hands.” She wriggled fingers back into the glove and touched one cheek. “My face wasn't swollen. My shoes fit.”

“Then what happened?”

“I assembled these bones.” Again she tapped the crate. From inside came a muffled clatter, like the sound of gravel sliding.

“You're becoming one of
them
?”

“So it appears.”

Her upturned lips and downturned eyes gave me contradictory messages. The clown-sad eyes seemed too far apart, and her forehead, obscured behind a thicket of hair, seemed impossibly broad.

“Aren't you frightened?” I said.

“Not anymore,” she answered. “Not since my head began to open.”

I winced, recalling the vast skull, pale as porcelain, and the triangle of eyes. I touched the bone-box gingerly. “What are you turning into?”

“I don't know yet. But I begin to get glimmerings, begin to see myself flying.”

“Flying?”

“Or maybe swimming. I can't be sure. My vision's still blurry.”

I tried to imagine her ankles affixed with wings, her head swollen like a double moon, her third eye blinking. “And what sort of creature will you be when you're . . . changed?”

“We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?”

“We?”

“You've put the bones together, haven't you?”

I stared at my palms, and then turned my hands over to examine the twitching skin where the knuckles should be.

“Have you noticed there aren't nearly so many dreams these days?” said the man who sat down next to Veronica on the park bench one April morning. He was about her age, mid-twenties, bearded, bespectacled, thin as a bird's wing, with the secretive air of a spy. “And the dreams that do come,” he added, “are so threadbare you can see right through them.”

When Veronica merely studied the black scuffed toes of her nurse's clogs without replying, the man leaned toward her and confided, “It comes from cutting down the old forest. There aren't enough places for dreams to roost in the daytime. I can remember when this whole ridge was covered in trees.”

Ordinarily, when a strange man addressed her, Veronica either ignored him until he fell silent or else, if he persisted, she glared at him and walked swiftly away. But she was intrigued by what this stranger said, and reassured by his shyness. Accustomed to being stared at by men, she found it refreshing that he peered through his metal-rimmed glasses in every direction but hers.

“Yes,” she said. “From the fire tower you could see trees all the way to the horizon.”

The man nodded agreement with a wag of his chin. Veronica gripped the edge of the bench to keep her hands from trembling, wondering if she had finally met a kindred soul.

Although she did nothing to enhance what nature had blessed her with, neither padding nor painting, wherever Veronica went men flung after her the lassos of their gaze. They saw in her wavy auburn hair and rosy complexion promises of offspring and delight. Her swaying walk set their hearts racing. Had they been moose or bison they would have battered one another to win her favor; since they were human, they invited her on dates. But Veronica found her suitors to be drearily predictable, passionate only about money and sex, perhaps with milder interest in cars or golf, without an ounce of imagination. Their idea of high adventure was to try a new restaurant or to shift the asset allocation in their portfolios. One after another she told them no, no, a thousand times no.

“You won't bloom forever,” her mother warned. “One day the bees will stop buzzing around.” Then I won't get stung, Veronica thought. “Would a doctor be such a bad catch?” her father asked. Caught like a cold, she thought, or like plague? She bit her tongue and let her parents nag. For how could they know what she longed for, when she had only the vaguest notion herself?

She chose to work the graveyard shift in the emergency ward because at night there were fewer doctors around to pat and pinch and ogle her. The bleary-eyed interns only gave her speculative stares, as if they were studying the menu but too tired to eat. The male nurses had learned to fear her wrath.

Night was the prime time for accidents and mayhem, as if people took leave of their senses with the onset of darkness. Husbands beat up their wives. Boys raped their girlfriends. Mothers with nerves rubbed raw by bawling infants took too many pills. Toddlers swallowed paperclips or mothballs or keys. Teenagers tried uppers or downers, sliced their arms with razor blades, wrecked their cars. Drunks tripped on curbs and broke bones. Muggers worked the sidewalks, car thieves worked the streets, rival gangs fought over turf with guns or knives. During the graveyard shift, wave after wave of sirens rushed toward the emergency room like storm-driven surf.

“It beats me why you keep working nights,” her father said, in the tone of baffled affection he had used toward Veronica since her adolescent blossoming. “You've got enough seniority to work afternoons, maybe even straight days.”

“Don't hide your light under a bushel,” said her mother.

“Those surgeons you work with can earn a thousand bucks with a few flicks of a scalpel,” her father said, “and you won't give them the time of day.”

“You're so often asleep when your beaus call, I have to convince them you aren't sick,” her mother complained.

“They aren't my beaus,” Veronica said. “They're just men pestering me.”

Her mother sighed. “You're punishing us, aren't you? As if it's our fault you're gorgeous.”

“Okay,” her father conceded. “Maybe all the doctors are creeps. But there's other fish in the sea. Right? What about that vice president from the bank? Or the bowling alley magnate? Or the tech entrepreneur? Or the contractor who builds pizza franchises? Those are decent guys, and they're rolling in dough.”

“Snag a husband while you can,” her mother advised. “Do you want to be a night shift nurse for the rest of your life?”

The answer to that question was no. Veronica did not want to be any sort of nurse forever. She was already nearing burnout from dealing with broken, bleeding, desperate people. But she could not decide what else to do with her life. No matter what path she envisioned—teaching, forestry, market gardening, graphic design—it led through a gauntlet of men. They would be her bosses, her colleagues, her students, her customers. Until her accidental beauty faded, they would value nothing else about her. With their rudimentary drives, men seemed to her a separate species, trapped in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, like plankton or horseshoe crabs, while women had evolved to higher levels of complexity.

For the present, Veronica stuck with her midnight shift despite the stress and gore. After supper she changed into her navy blue scrubs and sturdy clogs. Although her jacket and pants were a couple of sizes too large, chosen to fit loosely, when she arrived at the hospital men would still gawk at her.

She always arrived early and parked her car at the edge of the lot near a stand of big trees, mostly beeches and maples and oaks, the last survivors of an ancient forest that once covered the ridge now occupied by the hospital. From this vantage point, she could see skeins of streetlights stretching along the three rivers that converged at the heart of the city, the flashing red beacons atop bridges, the glare of blast furnaces, the jets of yellow flame above refineries, and steam drifting in luminous clouds above the mills. But her chief pleasure was to watch the dream creatures stir from
their roosts in the high branches and go gliding down to haunt the bedrooms of sleepers.

Once she clocked in for work, time passed quickly in a siege of heart attacks, gunshot wounds, diabetic seizures, broken legs, collapsed lungs, third-degree burns, and sundry other afflictions, all accompanied by cries of pain. Among the few patients who lifted her spirits were the expectant mothers, too far along to reach the maternity ward, who staggered in and delivered their babies on a gurney, often into Veronica's gloved hands.

During the rare lulls between emergencies, she wrote lists in a small notebook she kept in her pocket—lists of proverbs, vegetables, rivers, constellations, titles of books, women scientists, famous painters, obscure actors, songs—lists of anything she could dredge up from her brain. While hoisting the bag for a blood transfusion or pressing defibrillator pads to a patient's chest, she might recall burnt sienna or Baton Rouge, Louisiana; then at the next opportunity she would add those items to her lists of colors or state capitals. Noticing her habit, one of the gawkers might ask, “What are you scribbling, baby doll?” “Poetry,” she might answer, to discourage the man, or “Letters to a crazed world.” Indeed, as the world sank into disarray, she would have written poetry if she knew how, but at least she could make little havens of order by writing lists.