Once, a couple years back, Dubbs put a coil of fresh flypaper inside our freezer to see if the temperature would affect its stickiness. When she hung the frozen helix from a lamp on the back stoop that night, flies and moths came to it by the dozens, sticking and struggling until their wings disintegrated, until Dubbs cried and I doused the writhing flypaper in a bucket of water.
Now I’m as cold as that flypaper. I lift my hand in a flimsy wave and compose my sweetest smile.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he says as he opens my lid. “What if it wasn’t me?”
“It has to be you,” I say, and beam gratitude. “Nobody else lets me wake up.”
“If Dr. Ash figured out what I’m doing, she’d kill me,” Ian says.
Every now and then, Ian lightens up on my meds. When the narcotics wear off, I can come around, and usually he’s beside me already, waiting for me.
“So why do you, then?” I ask.
“You know why,” he says. He glances over his shoulder and then back at me with a shy smile. “I’ve been thinking of you.”
He hovers awkwardly closer, and I close my eyes. His lips are light on my cheek, with a tickle of mustache, and I know he wants me to turn to him, but I just can’t. He’s too repulsive. I’m grossed out by the possibility he might actually press his lips to mine. So far, since he knows I’m conscious, he has refrained, but I don’t know how long that will last.
“I brought you something,” he says.
I open my eyes as he passes me a sprig of fresh mint.
“It’s from my grandmother’s greenhouse,” he says. “It’s fresh. You have to crush it a little. Hold on. I’d better do it for you or you’ll get it on your fingers.”
He pinches a few of the green leaves, and when I brush the soft foliage against my nose, a burst of ripe scent fills my nostrils.
“Wow,” I say, and inhale again. The tangy mint is the essence of green.
“Like it?” He drums his fingers on the side of my sleep shell and smiles.
“It’s amazing,” I say. This much is true. I lick a corner of one leaf.
“Don’t eat it. We can’t mess with your digestion. But go ahead and smell it again. Todd’s out on break, and Harvey called in sick. Or his kid’s sick, in any case.”
“So it’s just you today? You have a lot of responsibility.”
We should have more time to talk, I think. More time for me to work on him.
“It’s not that hard. We’re down to only seven dreamers right now,” he says. “We should get more next week, though.”
“Then it’ll be busy?”
He nods. “In a good way. Excuse me. I have to clean your port.” He undoes the shoulder snaps of my gown and folds it down carefully to reveal the port in my chest, inches above my left breast. It’s a lump under my skin, shaped like a mini donut and as big as a quarter. As we talk, he takes the old IV needle out of me and cleans the surrounding skin. “You know what I like most about this job?” he asks.
“What?”
“The dreams,” he says. “Seeing them. Dr. Ash lets me watch while she’s mining, and you wouldn’t believe the things you all come up with. Flying’s my favorite, but I like the twisted dreams, too, the ones that make no sense. You can never guess where they’ll go. Oh, and the flashing color ones, those are good, too,” he said. “You have very nice dreams,” he adds politely.
“Do I?”
“Yes. Very colorful and unpredictable. Even the awful ones are interesting.”
“What awful ones?”
He puts in a new IV. “You dream about the black guy who falls off the tower,” Ian says. “Sometimes he turns into your little sister. She falls backward and screams and then you, like, scramble.”
I fixate on a vivid image of little Dubbs with her arms out. She’s a silhouette against a blue sky, falling and pinwheeling with panic. Her fall stretches out and rips into me because I can’t save her, and then I slam down the door in my mind to block it out.
“I don’t want to talk about my sister,” I say.
“Sorry.”
Instead, I recall the real episode of falling off the observatory ladder, hitting into Burnham on my way down, and plummeting with him to the ground. There’s an awful crunch, a sound I don’t consciously remember hearing at the time, and then a suspended silence before a bird chirps in the distance.
“You’re making me remember things,” I say.
“Is that bad?”
“I don’t know.” It’s better than being asleep forever.
“That black guy wasn’t your boyfriend, was he?” Ian asks.
“No,” I say.
“Would you date someone black?”
“If I liked him,” I answer.
Ian sniffs and wipes at his nose. “You also dream about the other guy,” he says. “I forget his name. The kitchen guy. I never liked him.”
Linus lay unconscious on Berg’s operating table the last time I saw him. Guilt taints my memory, as harsh as the lights on the stainless steel. Linus was there in the vault because of me, and if Berg hurt him, if he scraped through Linus’s dreams, it’s my fault.
“Maybe you miss him,” Ian says. “I understand. That’s okay.”
I shake my head. I can’t bear to think of Linus, either. “We broke up,” I say.
Ian pats my shoulder. He sets aside the suction cleaner.
“You don’t need to be sad,” Ian says. “You have me, now.”
“I know. I’m so glad,” I say. I force myself to meet his gaze again. “You’re so nice and understanding. How did I get so lucky?”
He blushes again and hooks up my IV. “Dr. Ash says you’re doing a little better. I was worried you were kind of getting mined out, you know? But I think maybe the stimulation has helped, don’t you?”
“I’m sure it has,” I say, and smell the mint again. What’s mined out mean?
“I had one bad moment, though,” he says. “I showed up in one of your dreams.”
“You did? When?”
“The other day,” he says. “I was worried Dr. Ash would guess what we’re doing, but you dreamed that I was hunting in a forest with a gun. In camo and boots, with a pistol, which doesn’t make much sense from a hunting perspective. How did you know I have a pistol?”
“I didn’t,” I say.
“I thought it was a close call, but it was also kind of cool,” he says. “She didn’t ask me anything about it, fortunately. I don’t know what I would have said.”
“When did she last mine me?” I ask.
Ian flips a tablet at the foot of my sleep shell. “Six days ago.”
“I don’t remember that,” I say.
He smiles wisely, the way he does, with his lips stretched so a line of wet shows at the crease. “Of course not. You were asleep, silly. I for sure don’t mess with your meds the day of a mining.”
“When will she mine me again? Is that on that chart?”
Ian inspects the tablet again, squinting for a moment. “Tomorrow. I’ll give you your full dose when we’re done. Don’t worry.”
My pulse picks up. I have to focus on getting Ian to help me out of here.
“Ian, will you do something for me? Will you call my parents for me and tell them where I am?”
Ian adjusts a shoulder snap on my gown and tucks my blanket softly around my waist. The IV is ready for a final twist of the upper clamp. “They aren’t in charge of you anymore,” Ian says. “Berg is your guardian.”