“Will, Will! What’s happening?” I shrieked, turning to look at him and Lena where they sat with their backs against the headboard, their legs stretched out on the bedspread.
But they seemed to be walled off. When I leaned over the bed to reach out to them something in the air resisted me. I couldn’t punch through the space around them, though I tried, increasingly desperate. Lena and Will looked the same as ever but I could see my hair growing in front of my eyes, my hair was getting longer and longer on my shoulders, inch by inch it moved down the front of my shirt, my hairs were visibly lengthening.
My little girl was looking calmly at her picture book, touching the drawings. She looked so normal, just here, just the way she should be. But I—I looked up at myself in the mirror. There was an ominous element to the growth of my hair, the choppy, almost digital-looking growth of the ends, so fast it was visible to the naked eye. There was something badly wrong. I wasn’t myself, but the image of me.
Lena’s fingernails were normal where they lay on the bottom edge of the pages of her book, bitten off a bit but normal: Goodnight, nobody, said the text on the page.
Beneath my own lengthening fingernails a line of dirt crept, growing along with the keratin.
I’d seen this somewhere, I thought, seen this somewhere before.
“OK,” I said, and made myself take deep breaths, count slowly. One of the hypnotic visions or a vivid nightmare—in any case nothing physically real, that was clear from the nails, from the hair—impossibility. I had to figure out the rules of the nightmare; possibly I could control it and wake myself up. I turned my back on Will and Lena and walked to the window again, where birds appeared on the cliff edge and then flicked away. The grass was greener, yes, the ice melted and springtime was here, even the color of the ocean changed from gray to a bluer hue, even the color of the sky.
I heard a voice in the other bedroom and went back through the interior door, reluctant to let Lena and Will out of my sight but pulled there somehow—still, all this was an effect, wasn’t it? An effect, I remember telling myself as the light kept changing up around me, lights shifted and went from dark to dim to bright. It was disorienting. But part of me also worried that I’d been drugged again and this would turn out to be another kidnapping, so I made sure the chain was on the room door. Dream or not, lock the door, I said as I went. Dream or not, lock the door.
The voice was coming from my laptop, open on the bed where I’d left it during my shower. I came up beside it and I could see the screen: Ned’s face. It was a video call, his head in a window on the screen—talking to someone else as I came up, his face in profile, but he turned and looked at me.
“A little fast-forwarding,” he said.
“What? What do you mean?”
“I hit the fast-forward button,” he repeated. “Didn’t you see? The kid. Your boy in there. They’re not going so fast, are they? You’re all alone.”
They were at regular speed, I realized. But I was sped up.
“You’re growing old,” said Ned, and smiled again. “See?”
I looked down: new wrinkles on my hands. Old hands. Somehow I’d moved through time alone—and yet still I spoke at normal speed, or else I couldn’t have talked to Ned; I still thought normally. Didn’t I?
“It’s impossible,” I said, more to myself than him. “It’s just a bad dream.”
“That’s what you do with losers, right? Isolate them. You’re one of the losers, wifey.”
“But how—why are you doing this? I was cooperating, Ned. I did what you asked, didn’t I? I don’t get it.”
“I’ve got the primaries in a few weeks and I need my pretty wife where I want her. A mental case, alone and needy. Makes them do what they’re told. Obedient. And a nice little bereavement in the family. Sympathy vote’s the icing on the cake. I look good in black. Well. I look good in everything.”
“A bereavement?”
“I took your time from you. You’ve missed a whole lot. Just take a look.”
Outside the picture window the sun was bright. Gnats and flies hung in the air. There were bunches of grass near the edge of the cliff and they were full green, bowing and dancing in the breeze.
“Ain’t we got fun?” said Ned.
Doris Day was singing it in the background. Not much money, oh but honey, ain’t we got fun . . . There’s nothing surer: the rich get rich and the poor get children . . .
I had a cold feeling. I was brittle as bone.
Had he made me a ghost?
I’d disappeared—I’d gone, slipped out of being like water down a drain. Was my girl alone now? Was Will looking after her?
“Like I said, we’re going out today,” he said. “We have a public appearance. Believe me, darlin’, it’s easier if you don’t fight it. Don’t get yourself all bothered. You won’t get anywhere, I promise. You’re confused, sure. You’re a sick woman. You’re weak. But it won’t be forever. You don’t have to go on that much longer like this. Just do what I say. OK? Put on the gown.”