Feeling helpless, useless, he stood listening to her despairing sobs, to the thin shrill animal sounds of utter desolation that tore from her between desperate ragged breaths. She sounded like a child, racked as much by fear as by misery. Her heartbreak sharpened his own until he could not stand to listen to her a moment longer.
If Nancy reverted to childhood in her grief, Murphy fell back into the angry rebellion of adolescence. He took a six-pack of cold beer from the refrigerator and carried it up to the roof deck. He wanted to punch someone, anyone, just punch and punch until he was exhausted and his knuckles were swollen. He wanted someone to pay—to suffer and be chastened—for the unfairness of Bibi’s cancer. But there was no one to hold responsible, nor anyone to comfort him, not in a world where what will be will be. Instead, he sat in a redwood lounge chair, opened the first can of Budweiser, and chugged it as he stared over his neighbors’ roofs, over the few lights along the last width of the bluff, stared out into the vast night sea, which lay black under a moonless sky, black under a higher blackness salted with icy stars, its presence confirmed only by the rhythmic rumble of the breakers punishing the shore. Halfway through the second beer, he began to cry. Weeping only fueled his anger, and the angrier he became, the harder he wept.
He wished they had gotten another dog after Olaf died. Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance.
Dogless, perhaps soon to be childless, after only two beers, Murphy felt lost. If he had tried to go downstairs to his wife at that moment, he would not have been surprised if he’d been unable to find his way off the roof deck.
With a crisp metallic sound, the ring-pull peeled open the third can.
The dream that came to Bibi the first night in the hospital was one that she’d been having on and off for more than twelve years, since before Olaf, the dog, had found his way to her:
She is ten years old, asleep in her bedroom at the rear of the bungalow in Corona del Mar. She does not thrash or whimper, but across her softly illumined young face pass tormented expressions.
Abruptly she sits up in bed, though this awakening is part of the dream in which she still resides. In response to three shrieks of a night bird, she throws back the covers and steps to the window.
In the courtyard, lit by only the grin of a Cheshire moon, two mysterious robed and hooded figures, tall and shambling, carry a rolled rug, moving toward the garage apartment. Visibility is poor, but Bibi intuits deformities in their limbs and spines.
When she realizes that the rug is in fact a corpse wrapped in a shroud, she knows they must be returning the dead man to the place of his demise. As though it feels the weight of her stare, one of the bearers of the body turns its head to look at Bibi where she stands at the window. She expects a dimly visible skull within the hood, the classic countenance of Death, but a worse revelation awaits her. The night brightens somewhat, as if an immense solar flare has bloomed on the farther side of the planet, reflecting fiercely off the crescent moon. The hood keeps more secrets than the better light reveals. But before the intruder turns away from her, she sees something that she cannot abide; the glimpse so terrifies her that she does not—cannot, will not—carry the image with her into the waking world, but instead confines it to the world of sleep, forgotten or at least repressed.
For the second time in the dream, young Bibi sits up in bed, breathless, trembling, chilled to the marrow. When she switches on the lamp, she discovers the shrouded burden that the hooded creatures had been carrying. The wrapped figure sits in a corner chair, for the moment still. Then it squirms in the confining shroud—and speaks.
The third time Bibi sat up in bed, she was awake and no longer a child. By repetition, the nightmare had lost much of its power years earlier. She no longer cried out on waking or trembled. But the skin creped on the back of her neck, and a thin sweat cooled her brow.
As on other such occasions, a rough voice followed Bibi from the dream, speaking words out of context: “…is everything.”
The voice was always the same one, but it did not repeat the same words every time. Sometimes he said, “supreme master” or “so sadly to seek,” or “the word was,” or scraps even more mystifying.
The other hospital bed remained empty. She was alone.
The ambient glow of the suburban sprawl laid a yellow faux frost on the window. Above her headboard, the lamp by which she’d written her impressions of the day was at its lowest setting, bright enough only to allow proper care when the nurse looked in on the patient.
The dream, which had been frequent when Bibi was ten, occurred less often as the decade passed. Now it came once or twice a year.