Unseaming (5 page)

He resolved to use the time for an early morning jog, donned sweats and shoes and snuck out. Halfway up the stairs to the parking lot, he stopped short. A derelict lay curled in fetal position on the landing. If it weren’t for the wet rasp of the man’s breathing, Bryan might have thought him dead.

Unwashed for weeks, the accumulated residue from the Blessings masked the man’s features in a gruesome black crust. As Bryan stepped around him, the bum’s eyes opened, twin ovals of bloodshot pink in the scab of his face.

* * *

On the first day of the Blessings, billions woke up screaming.

Every human on the planet had emerged from sleep looking as if they’d crawled from a blood-filled tub. This happened to newborns and elderly, tribesmen and movie stars, prisoners and dictators, soldiers and presidents.

On
that
morning, two and a half years ago, Bryan jerked awake as Regina shrieked in his ear.

He and Regina first met at the fitness club downtown. He worked as a reporter for the smaller of the city’s two metro papers; she worked at a bank branch only a block away. At their first conversation he had felt a fierce attraction to her—dark hair with exotic blond streaks; green almond eyes; quirky lopsided grin; a head shorter than him but not at all short on curves. He found everything she said fascinating, and she appreciated, and reciprocated.

Within two weeks they became intimate. At four weeks out—the night before the Blessings—they were still in the giddy exploratory stages. Her olive skin fascinated him; it tasted oddly sour and salty; he wasn’t sure if he liked the flavor but took every opportunity to re-evaluate the taste.

They fell asleep on her sofa that night, limbs tangled together, neither the least bit concerned about personal space.

She woke first, and screamed at the sight of his blood-covered face.

He had practically leapt from the sofa, and seeing her dripping with abattoir residue, revulsion struck ahead of thought and he shoved her away, so that she fell onto the glass coffee table—which shattered beneath her.

Miraculously, she wasn’t cut, although at first it had been impossible to tell. Once they were clean, once it became clear the blood came from neither of them, once the television news showed them that something had gone wrong not just in Regina’s living room but all over the world, then their panic changed, and to each other they could be civil, even tender. He apologized repeatedly, and she told him she accepted.

But seeing each other, feeling each other’s skin
that way
overwhelmed their fledgling attraction, almost severed it. Neither wanted to touch the other, not then, not for weeks, not for months.

* * *

That morning
, Bryan’s profession had meant that he couldn’t stay home, couldn’t recover from his freak-out. He had to get to his cubicle, man the phones, conduct interviews, shove aside his own confusion and despair and charge ahead, write something to help the paper’s readership make sense of things, or at least understand they weren’t alone. He had endured this before, when the twin towers collapsed, and closer to home, when a crazed gunman killed thirty innocent young students at Bryan’s alma mater.

But this was worse, far worse.

Too agitated to stay put in his chair, he hadn’t noticed the blinker for new voicemail till after he finished his first interview: an insincere message of all-is-under-control from the city’s audibly frightened director of public safety.

The voicemail came from Sukhraj Patel, sleep specialist, his odd friend of more than five years.

“It happens in your sleep, Bryan. And only in your sleep. You have to come down and see what we recorded. You have to get here!” The usually imperturbable professor so rushed his Indian bass-baritone that Bryan couldn’t make out many of the words. And he had no time then to replay it. His editors were determined to print a special edition by noon, and it was proving damn near impossible to reach anyone by landline.

The phenomenon started in the Americas, and news of it traveled the world with the dawn. It wasn’t until a few days later that sufficient information pooled to show the Blessings truly began everywhere on the planet at once.

In San Francisco at 2 AM, a security guard woke from a forbidden nap and raised his red, glistening hands to the light above his desk. His befuddled mind gradually registered that his entire uniform had soaked dark.

In Brasília at 8 AM, a boy who had spent the night sleeping beneath cardboard under a bridge scrambled out of his refuge, holding out his blood-covered arms and crying “Murdu! Murdu!”

In Kabul at 2:30 PM, a young mother singing a lullaby over her baby’s crib stopped with a shriek of horror, as red beads welled from every pore of her sleeping daughter’s skin.

Five days later, in Sukhraj Patel’s office, Bryan watched a video on the professor’s paper-flat computer monitor. The footage was of himself, lying face up in a laboratory bed, electrodes pasted to his shaved scalp. He watched himself drift off to sleep. Watched the blood well up. Watched as he endured what everyone endured every time they slept.

Because the Blessings didn’t stop with that first day. They never stopped.

* * *

Bryan and Patel met over their common interest in dreams. For Patel, they were a subject of research; for Bryan, a lifelong battleground.

Cursed since infancy with an overactive imagination, Bryan’s dreams spiraled into terror in the wake of a handful of Poe stories read aloud by his third-grade teacher. None of his classmates seemed fazed by “The Black Cat” or “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but the stories left Bryan deeply disturbed, unlocked nightmares, even night terrors: mist leaking from the light fixture above his bed that gelled into an eyeless old man; spidery legs long as tree branches that groped from closet shadows; dark dream-alleys where he ran from people tugged by puppet strings formed from their own arteries and veins.

His ordeals didn’t end for years. A night-light did no good. Some nights he became so terrified he’d pee into his Smokey Bear sheets rather than risk the walk to the bathroom. With escalating impatience, his parents told him to keep focusing his mind on Jesus. At first he lied and claimed it worked, but after yet another bed-wetting episode his enraged father shook the truth out of him.

What finally saved him at the not-so-tender age of fourteen was a book about lucid dreams he found at the community college library. He followed the recommended exercise out of desperation, repeating until he fell asleep: “I will know when I am dreaming. I will remember what I dream.”

Just as his first encounters with the morbid plunged him into nightmare, his first attempt at lucid dreaming introduced him to unlimited power. He again found himself in the City of Mazes, pursued by a crowd pulled on fleshy strings.
You are all inside my head
, he thought, and knew they were. He commanded,
Stop
, and they did, collapsing to the ground as their severed strings thrashed like loose hoses.

From then on he reigned, wizard-tyrant in the kingdom of his own skull.

At fourteen, Bryan had other dreams, much more mundane. Win fame and fortune as a freelance writer. Marry a saucy redhead from Ireland, and build her a mansion with his riches. When he met Patel, he had inched toward the first of those goals.

The university in the next county had called for volunteers to participate in an experiment meant to test a therapeutic cure for recurring nightmares. On learning of this, Bryan begged the higher-education reporter to let him step in and write a feature story. Once he turned in his profile of the professor, he begged his managing editor for permission to chase a freelance article. Permission granted, Bryan signed up for the tests.

His face a wide brown square above his white lab coat, Patel approached life and subjects like the coolest of poker players. The professor’s perpetually half-lidded eyes rarely hinted at anger or amusement. The rumble of his voice stayed perpetually even-toned. He was by far the most unflappable man Bryan had ever met, though he wasn’t without a sense of humor.

As soon as Bryan described his lucid dreaming skills, the professor wished to observe for himself. They performed a simple verification: Patel asked Bryan to move his eyes right to left and back again twice every 10 seconds while “awake” within his dreams. Bryan found this easy. The EEG graphs recorded during Bryan’s REM sleep displayed sharp spikes for the paired eye movements, over and over, making his brain waves appear regular as heartbeats.

When he woke, he heard Patel’s rumble. “For what reason would you hone such a skill?” The professor tapped Bryan’s forehead with a cold finger. “Do you keep a harem organized in your head, perhaps, like the crazy man in that Fellini film?”

Bryan kept his voice as flat as the professor’s. “Wouldn’t it be
obvious
if I did?”

Silence hung between them. Then Patel’s scowl fell away, and Bryan had the pleasure of actually hearing the professor laugh, like a mirthful bellow from a bear.

As often happens with writer and source, the two pledged to keep in touch after the article’s publication, but didn’t—until the Blessings began, and Bryan discovered he could no longer remember dreams.

Nor could anyone else.

It wasn’t as if dreams were simply gone, driving a sleep-deprived populace toward madness, but as if something else had supplanted them, an enigma that let people maintain their sanity even as it washed the world in blood.

* * *

When Bryan returned from his jog, predawn light cast the cookie-cutter houses of his neighborhood in dark silhouette. The derelict had left the stairwell.

Regina was up—he could hear the shower running when he opened his door. She’d already stripped the bloodied sheets from the bed and replaced them with clean ones. He called Sukhraj’s cell and left a voice mail.

His eyes flicked to the bureau by the side of the bed Regina had claimed. Her new pendant dangled there from one of the drawer knobs, an object escaped from a bad dream, a red diadem inscribed with a gothic “G.” Regina had a knack for involving herself in loopy things—she believed wholeheartedly in ghosts and nature spirits, paid to take classes in energy manipulation and chakra healing—a trait that Bryan at times found exotic, endearing, but now found alarming. Yet he’d kept his mouth shut, held back, when they met for dinner last night and he noticed the red G glittering in her cleavage.

The casual text she’d sent that started it—
how r u doin?
, then,
I want 2 c u
—caused a pang of longing in his chest that was amplified tenfold by his first glimpse of her beneath the dimmed lights at Pazzari’s. She’d cut her silky brown hair short, added red highlights. The blue half-jacket adorning her shoulders was the same she’d worn on many lunch dates before the Blessings. Even with the lights turned down low, her green eyes shone.

They hugged and forced the hostess to wait before escorting them to their table. As Regina took her chair, Bryan’s eyes eagerly followed her neckline down only to discover the diadem. The discovery stabbed as if he’d stepped on a nail.

The Gaians held that the blood of the so-called Blessings washed the human race each morning as a warning from the Earth spirit—or, as a sarcastic radio personality once phrased it, “Mother Earth’s PMS”—in response to the many ways Modern Man had damaged the world: pollution, strip-mining, clear-cutting, bomb testing, oil spilling, on and on. They claimed the blood of the Blessings was the blood of the dead mysteriously regurgitated.

Bryan knew animal welfare was a big deal for Regina, but he couldn’t imagine her associated with the dozen red-clad extremists who’d walked arm and arm toward a military oil refinery chanting, “Our blood will be on your bodies. Our blood will be on your bodies,” until the guards were forced to shoot stun grenades.

She noticed his grimace. “What’s wrong?”

It was hard to bite his tongue, but he managed. “Nothing.” He shook with nerves as he propped open his menu. “Just thinking about Mom and Dad.”

Which had in a way been true. All sorts of explanations existed for the Blessings, beliefs people wrapped around themselves for shelter against the sheer madness. A so-called psychic had once called Bryan at the office to claim the Blessings were the result of a bloodthirsty God gorged beyond its limit on those dead from modern warfare. Bryan hung up on him.

By contrast, a few Christian sects interpreted the blood-drenched mornings as God’s desperate attempt to save souls before the end-time, a literal attempt to cleanse the people who refused to accept the gift of their Savior’s blood. His parents had been among those, further deepening his estrangement.

And the irony: the Blessings could in fact bring disease if you didn’t make the most meticulous efforts at hygiene before and after sleep. His mother and father had both fallen ill. The diagnosis: a new strain of bacterial pneumonia, allowed to thrive by a devastated immune system.