“So much of it,” Erik said. “Jesus, it’s even more than I remembered.”
“This is my nightmare,” David said. “Right here. Down in the blood. Holding Daisy’s head. It’s fucking horrid. The reality is burned on my eyelids anyway. I don’t need to dream about it.”
“I know,” Erik said, putting his arm around David’s shoulders.
“Fuck the fucking fuckers.”
“My enemy does not triumph over me.”
“We own this place.”
Together they stared down the blood on the stage floor.
The blood blinked first.
They shrugged, young and dismissive, full of resilient bravado. They spit their contempt for fate, rubbed it into the stage floor with their steel-toed boots, and got to work rebuilding their theater.
The Mirror Tells the Truth
Their landlord was taking the summer to give Colby Street a much-needed paint job and tend to some other maintenance issues. So Erik and David took a dorm room on campus, sharing digs with the students attending the conservatory’s summer programs. On weekends, they headed out to Bird-in-Hand. There they bunked in the Biancos’ carriage house, which had been converted into a little guest apartment. It was a sweet, homey space overlooking Francine’s rose gardens, with two bedrooms, a shared bath, galley kitchen and living room. David took one bedroom. Erik took the other and Daisy came in with him.
Erik was impressed at how openly the sleeping arrangements were made. The Biancos were astonishingly hip to their daughter’s relationship. No coy pretenses or raised eyebrows when Daisy moved her things over to the carriage house. When it was time to say goodnight, they simply said, “Goodnight, sleep well.” In the morning, they said, “Good morning, sleep well?”
It was a lovely arrangement. It would have been lovelier had Daisy and Erik actually been having sex.
Her hands were warm and encouraging in the night and his body responded. Yet his mind was elsewhere. Detached and idly watching from a corner of the room. “It’s hard to explain,” he said, although he knew he didn’t have to. Under his touch, Daisy’s body was open, but ambivalent. She could take it or leave it.
“I guess it’s a post-trauma thing,” Daisy said, her eyebrows wrinkling. “I don’t feel much like it. I like touching you. And holding you. But I just feel so tired.”
“Tired’s one thing but I just feel unwired,” Erik said. “I don’t feel like me.”
She put her face against his chest. “It’ll be all right. Sex is probably first out and last back in. We’ll just keep throwing time at it.”
Time was kind and plentiful for them. All the weekends through July and August, when Daisy’s pain levels became more manageable and she gradually gained some mobility back, they lay naked in bed together, as comfortably twined as they could get. They kissed. They never tired of kissing. They talked the hours away. They laughed. They stared—they could still lock eyes and go into their private universe, and they went there frequently.
But they weren’t making love.
Not much, anyway.
Some nights she woke up screaming, and he soothed her. Unlike his Technicolor night terrors, her dreams were without imagery. “It’s pitch black,” she said. “And huge. There’s nothing to see but I can sense it goes out for hundreds of feet and up for hundreds of feet.”
“Is it a room? Or a cave?”
“I don’t know. It’s just the biggest darkest space I’ve ever known and it’s terrifying. I’m trapped there. No one else is in the dream. No story. No circumstance or context. It’s just vast black space and I can’t get out. It’s right behind my own eyelids and I can’t open them.” She moved further into the circle of his arms, shivering with unspeakable revulsion. “It doesn’t sound like anything but God, I just feel sick when I wake up…”