This Shared Dream (49 page)

“Dad and I drove back here, and it was like when I went, only things got newer and newer and we were back here. We came into the kitchen and Brian and his friend were here. But it was … it was clear that Mom had been gone a long, long time. I think that Mom knew the truth. I didn’t do anything that would have stopped the assassination, so it must have been her, or maybe Wink, or even someone else, who took out the real assassin, and after that, Mom…”

Jill took deep breaths and turned her face away. When she turned back to them again, her lips trembled; her eyes anguished. She howled, “Mom just
disappeared
! My heart … was broken. Dad’s too. We were just so, so sad.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, so that her hands held her opposite shoulder, and she shook her head back and forth, staring at them, her face crumpled in agony while she wept.

Brian and Megan both jumped up and crushed her in hugs. Megan said, “It’s all right, Jill, it’s all right.”

“It’s—
not
—all—right,” she managed to get out, in jerky words.

“You did what you thought you had to do,” Brian said. “You didn’t know that would happen.” He handed her some tissues. “Please, Jill, it really
is
all right. From my point of view.” He rubbed her shoulders, and Megan hugged her until she calmed down to snuffles.

“Have you ever told anyone else?” asked Megan.

Jill blew her nose. “Dad knew, of course. But no. No one. Oh”—she laughed, weakly—“the therapist. Nancy. She thought I was crazy, of course. But she did say that I had to tell you. I guess”—Jill hiccupped a few times—“she was right. But it was always too hard. And … Daniel.”

“Daniel?” asked Megan.

“Detective Kandell,” Brian told her. “He’s investigating the break-in. But why tell him?”

“When you wouldn’t even tell us,” Megan said.

“It’s very strange, but he remembers coming here when Mom had a school. His little brother went to school here. So there’s some weird kind of … connection. A bridge between the timestreams that we share. A … nexus? I have no idea why he remembers and you guys don’t. But he’d forgotten all about it until he saw the
Magpie
picture on the wall.”

“A likely story,” said Brian.

“Yeah,” Jill said. “It’s weird. But he did show me where he carved his initial in the sunroom—”

“What?” Megan looked incensed.

“And I do remember his little brother. And Daniel remembers me.”

“Kind of crazy,” Megan said. “Maybe he’s, you know, a creep.”

“I don’t think so,” Jill said, surprised that she was defending him.

“I really don’t either,” Brian said.

“We’ll have a chance to meet him and his family. I invited them for tomorrow.”

Megan rolled her eyes. “Great. But it’s still all a puzzle, mostly.” She picked up the board. “Maybe we can use this to find Mom and Dad.”

“No!” Jill jumped from her chair and yanked it from her. “That’s what you might
think
you’re doing. It’s seductive. It has its own agenda. It
used
me. We need to figure out what it really is, how it’s really meant to be used. It might be just a vestige of what Hadntz intended. We need to get in touch with her. After all, she showed up at the party.” Jill unlocked the desk, which she’d kept locked since the party, and got out Hadntz’s card. “There’s no contact information on it. Just her name. On the back it says, ‘The work never ends.’”

“Mom told me kind of the same thing in the station. I already told Brian. Something about the war lasting a lot longer than they thought it would.”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “It is a war. This board is obviously Q, maybe an early prototype.”

“I think Mom and Dad created Q,” Megan said.

“I do too. From Hadntz’s plans. Well, Mom just facilitated it. We’ll probably never know the whole story.” Brian dragged the box of notebooks out from behind a chair. “It’s all in here. Sketchy, but if we pool our information we’ll have a lot to go on. I’m an engineer, after all; Megan’s got a physics degree. And now we have the latest incarnation. Hadntz-dust, the HD-50, the magical memory neuroplasticity drug that will change us all into drooling babies. Can’t wait. When will it start to work?”

“Not babies,” Megan was focused and professional, on her own turf. “Probably a bit older. Cindy mentioned once that in her Montessori teacher training course, everyone said they were sure that they were still going through sensitive periods, even in their twenties. It’s true. Your brain’s still growing in your twenties. Evolutionarily speaking, once you’d gotten your kids grown up, that is, through puberty and into childbearing, probably the only next useful task for you was helping raise the grandkids. Provide wisdom. So maybe this is the next way for humans to engineer our own future, our own destiny, by modifying our biology.”

“It’s just not fair,” Brian said. “When I was a kid I thought I’d grow up and be finished. You know, myself. Instead, I keep changing from one person to another, and they’re all just kind of thinly connected with these memories and histories that seem continuous. Is that right, Megan? You’re the expert.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“Every change is worse than before. More painful. Disease. Memory loss. Yuck. And speaking of memory, Megan, where did you say you first got the board?”

“You don’t remember? We went to Peoples Drug to get Jill some cough medicine and I found it up on a high shelf and Mom bought it for me.”

Brian and Jill looked at each other. Brian said, “I have a different memory. We found it in the attic under some floorboards.”

“That’s my memory too,” said Jill.

“So? Do we vote?”

“You’ve heard of false memory?”

“I do research on false memory, as you well know, smarty-pants. But this memory is real.”

“So is mine,” said Jill.

“How do you know?”

Megan roused herself, backed up to the desk and leaned against it. “You’re right. We don’t know. Not really. It’s the oldest philosophical question in the world. It’s called phenomenology. We only know because we know. Our senses tell us.” She reached over and picked up the board she had brought, unfolded its metal legs so that it was like a foot-tall table, and set her glass of vodka on it. “Maybe we just have different pasts.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” asked Jill.

“That’s a good question. We have events in common, but, of course, even this moment is different for all of us. Depending on birth order, every child experiences a different family too. Whole groups of people can convince themselves of something—or, more usually, politicians can do that. Fascinating stuff.”

“Hitler, for example,” said Jill.

“Yes, it works best when there is extreme censorship, but trying to shame a group of people for their beliefs or memories can have an accretionary effect.” She sighed. “Well. I’m glad it’s not blinking.”

“Blinking?” asked Brian.

“It was blinking the other night.” Suddenly, Megan shook with laughter.

“What?” asked Brian.

“Where I saw Mom. At the station. There were lots of men. They were all wearing hats.”

A laughing fit swept through them. Jill’s stomach ached. Tears streamed from Brian’s eyes. Megan howled and curled up, knocking over the Game Board but, of course, holding on to her glass, now almost empty.

“Ahhh—haaa,” she gasped at last. She caught her breath, blew her nose again, and said, “Even Mom was wearing a hat.”

“Look,” said Brian. “Tell us about these pills.”

So Megan told them about how she’d met Hadntz, about her meticulous research, and about how she’d made the brain plasticity drug. And about Hadntz’s note that she had taken it. “I’ve tried to get in touch with her again, but she never responds.”

“Maybe that’s why I could play so well when I went to the jazz club a few weeks ago,” Brian said.

“Neuroplasticity is powerful stuff.”

“I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection, though. The papers start calling the Device a ‘Hadntz Device’ pretty early on, and then later iterations are HD, and numbered, and then the vitamins—ha!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Megan said. “Back up.” Her hair was no longer plastered to her head by sweat, but flying out whenever the fan turned her way, making her look like a wild woman, thought Jill. She thoughtfully refreshed Megan’s vodka. They’d eaten most of the cheese and crackers.

“Yes, please,” said Jill. “I haven’t read the papers either.”

Brian closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “You know Dad’s war history.”

Jill said, “He trained at Aberdeen on assembling and troubleshooting the M-9 Fire Director, part of the SCR-584. It could track and shoot a missile in flight, and intercepted Hitler’s doodlebugs. It had a 99.9 percent success rate and ended the V-1 attacks. He was in England for a year and a half in Ordnance, preparing for Operation Overlord, and in December 1944 was sent to Camp Lucky Strike at Le Havre to follow the Battle of the Bulge mop-up and set up a troop supply station in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in the British Sector. They were there till August of ’forty-five, and then were sent back to the States, supposedly en route to the Pacific to supply the invasion of Japan.”

“Yes,” said Brian. “True on the surface. But what he and his pal Wink were really doing, completely on their own, was trying to follow the plans Hadntz kept updating.”

Jill templed her fingers and bent her head forward.

“So, Jill, what are you thinking?” asked Brian.

“I’m thinking that every time there was an advance in her prototype,
time changed
. Or—our timestream shifted. Came into being. Whatever. And I think HD-50 is a prototype change, an advance. Wait a minute. I just remembered something.” She looked at Brian. “Remember when I told you that Mom and Dad visited me at the hospital?”

“Yes. I even told Megan about it.”

“Two other people also dropped in that night. Like, visiting hours for Jill Dance, psychotic, are from midnight to three
A.M
. One was a medium-tall man. Wearing a fedora, of course, but kind of familiar, and for some reason, comforting. Hmm. I guess he’s the Walking Man. He came before Mom and Dad. Didn’t say a word, stayed about two minutes. The other one was really scary. He seemed to be some kind of German SS guy. He had those little lightning insignias on his collar, or somewhere. A metal skeleton-head pin in the center of his hat. I screamed, and he left right away.”

“Okay,” said Megan. “And?”

“Let’s say that these crazy Nazis—I know they’re still around—know about the Device, and about Mom and Dad, and have been just hanging out, waiting. I’m afraid that I made Koslov suspicious. He’s one of the people you overheard at the party, Megan.”

“Right.”

“Although he is Russian, so theoretically, he should hate the Nazis. But if one of them could get into the hospital, they could also probably get my therapist’s records, in which I talk freely about my various insanities. Which they know are real.”

Megan nodded. “That really makes sense, in the context of what I overheard at the party. So people are trying to get the Device.”

“The plans, the notes, the Device, whatever. But if it is the Game Board is really Q—”

“It replicates,” said Brian, excited. “From what I understand, for a while, it was just a clear chunk of stuff, with colored threads inside. Dad wrote a lot of stuff in some kind of code, but he taught me the code when I was a teenager. It seemed like it was just for fun, but I guess he intended for me to read these notes.”

Jill nodded her head. “So let’s say it changes into things that are pleasing to the user. The attractive Game Board. Spacies. And it has the capacity to replicate, to spread. So, Megan, maybe—”

Megan frowned. “Maybe the one in my house just … I don’t know …
grew
? Jim said that Abbie found it next to a stack of old photos that I took from the attic.”

Brian added, “Right! And the day I found the saxophone in the attic, I found a loose board, and it seemed strangely familiar. I pried it up, and the hole was empty. I felt around and some gooey gunk got stuck to my hand, and I wrapped it up and tossed it in the car. Maybe that’s what turned into my Game Board.”

“And maybe,” said Jill, sitting absolutely still in her rocking chair, electrified, “I don’t really need one because probably this whole house has changed into one huge Device.”

“Ugh,” said Megan, looking around. “I guess the point is that we have to put this all together, try to figure out what’s happening, and try to decide what to do about it. For instance, someone, or some group, I guess, is doing its best to make it unpleasant to live in this house. That is bothersome.”

Brian said, “Yes, but Detective Kandell is on their trail.”

“On Jill’s trail, more like,” said Megan. “You said he took her to the market? For three hours? That’s detective work? Give me a break.”

“Daniel was protecting me. Someone
was
following me. A short, dumpy guy. With a hat, of course.”

Megan said, “Oh, it’s
Daniel
now. Well, the pursuer that Daniel so bravely saved you from sounds like the guy who was spying on me on the train. He got off around eight
A.M
. and I think he took the train back in this direction. So, maybe Kandell is legit.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know if I can handle this, Jill. So much is missing. I know that the people on the porch talked about Mom having a nursery school, and I know that she was taking courses at Georgetown, but I don’t recall the school.”

“I remember you in 1967 too,” said Brian. “You were painting with oils. Filling the house with noxious oil fumes.”

Jill said, “See, I don’t remember that. I can certainly imagine myself doing that, but I’ve never used oils, not this me.”

“You could probably create a very respectable false memory of having done that,” said Megan.

“How could I tell if it was real or false?”

“You can’t, not without outside corroboration. And young memories, in particular, are often false, because they’re constructed communally. Your uncle tells you about the time you fell in the pool when you were two and he rescued you, and pretty soon all the pictures are there.
Voilà!
So with more enhanced Total Recording of Life, as in the proliferation of home movies, home videos, photos, you can certainly think that you’re actually remembering when actually, you’re reconstructing, imagining.”