When the Dream Ends
Written By: D. C. Martin Sometimes a picture brings you back. Sometimes it drags you there even if you don’t want to go. Sometimes you have no choice.
When the Dream Ends
Written By: D. C. Martin
Sometimes a picture brings you back. Sometimes it drags you there even if you don’t want to go. Sometimes you have no choice. Liam Barnes stood there in the attic shivering, hating what he saw, hating that it had been hidden so long, hating himself. He looked at the two boys smiling back at him. Their stories hadn’t been written yet. But they would be written for real and forever, even if someone hid them and locked them away.
I had him. I swear I had him. I gripped his hand.
When your life ends, it becomes a box. The people you leave behind pack the box, mostly with the best things from other boxes. When Liam’s father died, he left a great number of boxes. He was an accomplished man, and more accomplishments means more boxes to sort. It was difficult; difficult to sort through each item from each box and discard almost everything. He noticed things that meant a great deal at some point, but were now just ghosts of a past that needed to be released, even as his hand tightened its grip on them, even as he had a good laugh, or let a hot tear roll down his cheek. Letting go isn't ever easy, but it's the only thing that will make the pain stop.
It happened on a Thursday. Liam remembered it vividly. His dad always had goals, that’s why he managed to stay alive for so many extra years; his obsession with reaching goals. He finally slipped away and his last words were all about reassuring Liam that the most important ones had been accomplished. He had been a good father, he had taken good care of his son, it was not his fault that mom left, he created a legacy that Liam could look on as an ambitious path for himself. He was a remarkable man. One of his many accomplishments was accidental. He made Liam completely unable to experience any pride in his own achievements. His father made this possible by protecting him from the pain that might result from making a mistake. He removed mistakes from his son’s memory. But Liam knew they were there and he knew he had to uncover them. It became his obsession, it became his goal.
Liam began making a box of his own. It took many years and it speaks to his many adventures. It contains tiny plastic tubes with childproof caps and plenty of warnings on the labels. They kept him dreaming the dream of his perfect childhood. They kept him from seeing the whole truth. He uncorked them and regarded their vintage, he waited for them keenly and signed papers that waived his rights should anything go wrong. He took them, he took them all and anticipated what dreams may come.
*
“Why do you keep staring at your hands?” Bobby asked.
Liam looked up at his son and snapped out of it well enough.
“Huh?” he said. “Eat your pancakes. Nothing to worry about.” Liam looked at the kitchen clock and thought about how it had been there for over twenty years. So had the table runner. This whole house was stuck in a moment that had passed by long ago. It was all her doing, of course. And it looked great, too. She was a wonderful woman and a great mom, he just wished she never got tangled up with him. He was grateful that she finally had the strength and wisdom to pack up and leave, but he wished she had taken the boy with her. There was nothing positive left for him in this house, which had become a prison of poisoned dreams.
Some people think that long term disability means a free pass, or an easy escape from the pressures of a working life. It didn't mean that for Liam. For him, it just meant living each moment with anger and regret, wishing that he could be more productive and cursing events from so long ago that he wasn't even sure that he remembered them accurately. It meant that every failure was amplified and constantly, permanently, playing on repeat.
“It’s almost seven o’clock. Let’s get moving,” he said as he looked out at the sunrise, lighting up the once glorious forty-two acres. It had always been a modest size, but until Liam took over, it was a real operation. He had sold almost everything away. The only thing that was the same was the old birch, and even that would have to go soon. Every time he heard a crack from a dead limb he would jump and then take increasingly longer to recover.
“Sure, dad,” was the response. Bobby knew his dad would never pay attention to him. Liam had accepted it just the same as his son.
Liam looked down at his hand again, gripping it. He was conscious of his son’s critical gaze, he was a failure not only as a husband. He was a failure as a father, too. He felt life slip away because of his hands. He felt the life go out from his father's hand, and he eventually had to let it go. They warned him that it might happen. People are placed in the Intensive Care Unit for a reason. It was all over in an instant, the cruel reality of the past. But as he reflected on that moment, he saw it over and over under the microscope of his unforgiving, relentlessly critical memories. Helpless to change them; locked away forever in the inescapable cell of guilt. That’s what this old house had become. Everywhere he looked there was a reminder of his father, something he had built, a picture he had taken, a wall he had painted. He built a real family around Liam, an only child, but Liam had failed miserably trying to do the same thing for his own son.
“You’re doing it again, dad.”
It's a terrible feeling thinking that your own child hates you. He knew how resentful his son was, he knew he blamed Liam for his mother's disappearance. He just needed time to come to terms with tragedy. He resented his son too, for not granting him that. Just a little time to get over things and understand the way life would have to reform itself. He burnt the pancakes that should have been fluffy on the inside and golden brown on the outside. It was his fault the breakfast was ruined. Mom would have done them perfectly. Was it Liam’s fault that Grandpa died, too?
“Tell you what,” Liam said, knocking the kitchen table chair down as he abruptly stood up. “You can drive yourself to school.” He threw the keys to the truck down and stormed out of the kitchen. Moments later he watched that rusted-out Toyota peel out of his laneway, gathering speed on the edge of Highway 20, bluish smoke spewing from the exhaust as the only remaining silver letters on the tailgate: Y and O, glinted rays from the rising sun.
He couldn’t take it any more. He let loose the caps from all of the childproof bottles and watched them cascade into the water and form a gently bobbing mosaic that probably cost thousands of dollars. He had measured out his life with Ativan, LITHOBID, Clozaril, and PAXIL tablets, to name a few. He watched as they all swirled in colourful rhythm away, away from him. They would imprison him no longer.
*
The dreams finally started to make sense. He struggled to understand them all his life, but now he knew, now he finally had clarity. But why would dad want to protect me from this, he wondered. It just made things worse. He started thinking about the first time he had the dream. He was quite a bit younger.
He woke up covered in sweat, screaming. He was not able to draw breath fast enough and it was clear that there was something seriously wrong with him. His parents both rushed in and he couldn’t even talk. The way he remembered it, he just kind of fell over and saw them screaming at him and shaking him. “What’s wrong, Liam? Can you hear me?” They were frantic, but he was slipping away. He was in and out of consciousness, completely unable to communicate. He kept looking at his hands, he kept gripping them. Harder, gripping so hard that his fingernails bit through the palms of his hands and he passed out.
When he woke up, dad was there asleep on a grey, purple and yellow patterned hospital chair. He looked very different than usual. His face was stubbly and his hair was messy. There was a pad of paper and a pen on the side table. It said a bunch of stuff he couldn’t understand, but even though he was only five, he could clearly make out the letters PTSD.
“Dad,” he said quietly, and his dad woke up with a start. He seemed to just jump over to his side and kept asking Liam if he was okay, kept asking if he was sure. Then he cried. Liam would never forget that moment.
He just let it all out and kept saying, “I thought I lost you. I thought I lost you.”
When they got home from the hospital, everyone was there. There was a big banner across the dining room that said, “Welcome Home, Liam!” All of his relatives were there and everyone in the neighbourhood, too. They all wanted to grab him and say things like, “Terrible business that, Liam. Don’t think on it.”
Or, “These things happen, you know. Pity it happened to you.”
More memorably, “Why, son? Why’d ya do it?” Liam remembered just wanting to be left alone, wanting to get away from people. He started breathing hard and ran into the kitchen and sat down against the pantry door. When the phone rang he scooched over where mom wouldn’t see.
“Hello,” mom said and paused. “Yeah, we’re doin’ alright,” she seemed concerned. “Managing, you know. Liam is still struggling. It’s hard to come to terms with it, that’s for sure, but we’re okay now and that’s the most important thing.” There was another pause. “I’ll admit, it’s been scary. Scary for me. His father is not handling it well … ”
That’s when she started crying. She looked up at the birch tree through the kitchen window, grabbed the cord and carried the phone away into the dining room. Liam couldn’t hear her anymore so he scuttled over towards her but accidentally knocked a bowl off of the counter. It didn’t break, but it skittered around on the floor in increasingly smaller, faster, more audible circles, alerting her to his presence. She looked over at Liam with the amount of distance in her eyes that he had grown to expect.
*
Left hand gripped, right foot plants itself, right hand gripped and the left foot makes its mark. Up the birch tree we go. Higher each year.
The tree grew faster than Liam did. It kept reaching to the sun, unrelenting. He went higher and he went faster. Too fast, maybe.
He was higher than ever and then there he was. Liam saw him: the boy from the picture. He finally understood it. Liam knew it would never go away, it was a moment frozen in time.
*
Liam woke up the typical way. He made a routine of coiling up at the end of the bed, taking deep breaths and massaging his temples until he felt relaxed enough to go about his routine. He walked downstairs and his son called to him, only he didn't realize Bobby was awake yet. He jumped back, startled, as usual. He couldn’t calm himself down. He felt so paralyzed by fear. His feelings were valid, he was making progress. He set about making toast as his breathing settled and his heart rate calmed.
“I am only making toast,” he heard his inner voice confirm.
“Breakfast,” he yelled out and as he expelled the words he got so breathless that he fell to the floor. He heard Bobby’s footsteps and made his way to a fully upright stance before the boy entered the dining room. Breakfast was served but he was distant again, thinking back to the dream.
I swear I had him for just a second. Just for the blink of an eye.
Liam felt like he needed to make sure he could black out the dream because he just couldn't take it any more. He drank a 26oz bottle of Bourbon while his son was at school. Sure enough he slept deeply that night.
*
“I’m at the top of the tree, I can look down. I can see everything,” Liam was lying down, eyes closed, in a dream-like state.
“You can see everything,” Dr. Miller confirmed suspiciously. She took the cap off of her marker, he could hear her. It was a red marker, with a felt tip. Its cap had a silver clip. She turned the page over on her yellow, green-lined notepad, making a distinctive rustling sound. Liam saw her red words bleed through cursive flicks and flails under the blacks of his eyelids.
“Open your eyes, Liam.”
He looked at the flipped-over page from the doctor’s pad and quickly deciphered the faint edges of backwards words. It was all thanks to her marker’s bleeding ink and her own indelicate writing style. She had a very consistent, legible script. He read what he expected about himself, but was much more entranced by her last patient, who must have been quite a piece of work; all of her notes describing his “sexual deviancy.”
Her eyes narrowed behind her rectangular, metallic glasses, perhaps realizing that he could read her notes. She was just about to write down something like, “The patient refuses to convey any truth when prompted to revisit the past.”
Liam had been coming to her for sessions ever since he could remember and he thought she hated him as much as he hated her.
He almost never said anything, so he took his time nodding and glancing at the floor as he always did. It was carpet squares. The edge of the floor was framed with modern MDF baseboard and the walls were all a cold grey that you would expect to be the number one choice of nine out of ten correctional institutions. There was a framed abstract piece above the desk that had a mostly blue background with a really striking bit of red in the foreground. Almost too blunt, almost off-putting, almost scary, but not enough to start a conversation about. Other than that nothing adorned the walls besides her certificates pronouncing various degrees and memberships for Cassandra Miller, psychiatrist.
“I can’t see anything. I can’t go on today. I thought I would be able to, but I just can’t.”
Dr. Miller leaned in closer and said, “I need you to try, Liam. This could be the breakthrough that we have been waiting for.”
Liam closed his eyes and tried to go back, even though he didn’t want to, even though he hated her, even though he hated her glasses, and the hurtful eyes behind them.
“I can see all the way up the tree. I can see them. I can see it like I’m watching from a distance. I can see the boys. I can see them.”
“Them. Really? I thought we got past this, Liam. This is your delusional memory. You needed to create a better reality to cope with what had happened, with the loss you suffered. But you don’t need that anymore. You have your own life, you have a son that you need to take care of. You were alone. There was no one else in the birch tree.”
Of course. This is paranoia, this is delusion, this is Liam. But what about the picture? Why was it locked away? Concealed practically his whole life. A presence ripped away by bad decisions, by a committee of people who knew better than him. He was going to take back his own life and with it take back reality, even if it is a pain too intense to bear.
“I can see it. I can see us both. It’s like watching a movie. I can see my hand … ” Liam felt like he did when he was five years old. Like this was the first dream all over again. He could feel himself turning black, turning to nothing.
“I need a nurse in here, stat … ”
*
When Bobby came to see him in the hospital, Liam had to tell his son again that this was only temporary and he needn’t worry.
“Go home, please. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“I love you, dad,” his eyes barely met his father’s as he said it. Visiting your father in the hospital is painful. Liam knew it and so did his son.
Bobby pulled his jacket on and shot Liam a nice smile as he turned to the door and disappeared down the hallway. What happened to me, Liam thought. I used to be a great father. He let the tears roll down his cheeks and wished that he had some serious alcohol.
*
“‘This is my tree! Climb down or suffer the consequences!’ I was serious, we both knew that. His eyes showed fear, but also the thrill of reaching the top of the tree. Looking down from that height was terrifying. Like the summit of a rollercoaster, waiting for the drop. It was all part of the fun of course, but climbing that high was … intoxicating. It was an old birch. Branches could snap any moment.”
Liam cleared his throat.
“The crack was loud, louder than you would expect. I saw his hand reach out. I saw it in slow motion. Just a momentary grip, it just happened for a second. The distance and the time. Damn, it can turn a hero into a villain. He was saved and then lost. He fell, my grip couldn’t hold him back. I just wasn’t strong enough. By the time he hit the ground, he was so broken and bloody. I just didn’t think he would get through it.”
Liam took a sip of water and breathed out hard.
“I had him. I gripped him, just around the wrist. It felt good, saving him. But I couldn’t hold him and I watched him fall. I knew when the first limb broke through him, when the first branch stabbed into him. I knew when I heard his bones crack and tear, I knew when he finally hit the ground and spat out blood. I knew then that I was going to do it. But when he finally got to the ground I just wanted him to forgive me. All I had was guilt.
“‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please, it was an accident.’ I kept apologizing, but then my hands gripped his throat and there was no going back.”
Doctor Miller rubbed her temple for a moment. “Just to be perfectly clear: you murdered your imaginary brother, correct?” As usual, she didn’t want to believe Liam.
“What do you want me to say?”
Dr. Miller tilted her head from side to side, rolled her shoulders and made an obvious display of checking her watch.
“What year did your mother leave, Liam?” she asked as she got her pen and pad ready to record the answer.
“I suppose it was around nineteen eighty-three,” he returned. It was September seventeenth, nineteen eighty-two to be exact. Liam was slowly becoming aware of his mental state, comfortably numbed by the receding effect of whatever medication was prescribed by the infallible Dr. Miller. Liam could feel himself finally taking control.
“Fine. You were young. Your mother left you. That was traumatic. You have every right to feel angry, you have every right to hate her, hate the world, hate me. Go ahead. But as an adult Liam, an adult with a therapist, you don’t need to turn yourself into the villain. Your mom was the villain. She left when you needed her most.”
Dr. Miller got up from her desk and walked to the window and looked out for a moment. She then returned to her desk, but stood in front, her fingers resting on its edges as she reclined a little. “I want you to be completely honest with me, Liam. I want you to admit that this is all a fantasy. You never had a brother, did you?”
Liam spent a good while trying to figure out a way to talk her into it. She wasn’t ever going to believe him, he knew that for certain. The boy in the picture was buried too deep. He looked away and then over at her for a second, at her rather severe expression, the furrows at the top of her nose. Then he looked at the wall of framed accolades that adorned her otherwise spartan office. He took in some deep breaths. The doctor taught him that.
“I’m ready,” Liam said, as the doctor turned a new yellow leaf.
“He suffered through those last moments. I watched him fall, faster than you could possibly imagine. I watched him hit the ground and sputter and cough and bleed. Then I looked at my hands again. If only I had held onto him. I ran to get help and he was rushed to the hospital, full recovery. A miracle.”
Liam always had trouble reading facial expressions. Especially now, her face was completely blank. For a moment, it seemed like the world had paused. He knew what he had to do.
“I never had a brother.”
The existence of the picture made him more and more angry because so much therapy and medication went into erasing it. His life had become such a lie, but you can't ignore a lie that is staring straight back at you from a forty-year-old photograph. He knew the truth and he finally had the proof to settle his mind. He could dream the rest of the dream. That’s when the dream ends, when you wake up certain that you know the truth and your psychiatrist doesn’t. The truth really happened and you spent your day erasing it.
*
There would be proof, he told himself. There would be a police record or something tangible. There would be evidence of his time spent in the hospital. Liam sifted through the contents of boxes. He scoured through papers and documents as Bobby slept downstairs. Heaps of his father’s life scattered on the floor, boxes empty and overturned in the cold attic. He was shivering and he could see his breath, but he wasn’t stopping. There would be something undeniable. He let things fall through his fingers, but caught a photograph. Here it was, he was holding it in his hand, shivering still. Finding the one tiny fragment from all of the items in all of the boxes to prove it. His smiling face. Liam’s arm slung around him, waiting for their stories to be written, both of them by a cruel author. The boy’s life was taken before he could become the failure that Liam was. He was lucky, he escaped the fate that Liam needed to suffer.
Liam was deprived of the truth for so long that he had become accustomed to it. He instantly knew why his parents had buried it. Part of him wanted to put it all back in the box and lock it all away again; close it up again and hide deep in the box in his mind. He understood why his father did it. But once that box was opened, there was no way to un-open it.
I had him, I know I did, I had him right there and I took it all away. I took it all away from him.
He turned the picture over. The words that his mother had written on the back made his heart race even faster: “Liam and Michael, best friends, 1981.”
It was clear now what needed to be done. He could picture the office, he could picture her smug expression behind her ridiculous glasses. He could see the cold grey paint and the MDF moulding. He could see the scary painting, and he could see himself doing it, like it was a dream that he had already dreamt. He could picture life leaving her, his hands gripping, the pulse coming to a stop.
“Let’s start with the dream again,” she said as she flung back a yellow page from her pad with her left hand and tucked it under her right hand, looking up at him, waiting behind the shiny, angular glasses. Liam was distracted by the backwards, bleeding-red words from his predecessor’s session:
“Bondage. Discipline.”
He devoured the words quickly, letting them bleed into the fibers of his anxious mind. She proceeded.
“Memories are complicated, Liam,” she said with a condescending gaze. “We remember the picture of something, but facts that we remember are tangled with feelings.”
She looked away from Liam and towards the window.
“We all have a self-image. I have one, my mental picture of myself. I believe that people see me in a certain way. But the idea that I can control that is an illusion. You think of me differently from the way I think of myself. I can accept that. In the end, I am more than just the way people perceive me, and more than the way I perceive myself. But the person, Cassandra Miller, who I am, that essence of me … I can’t define it and I can’t change it. No one can. You can’t escape who you are, Liam.”
She paused, as always, to insinuate his delusory state.
“Are you alright, Liam?”
*
When it was all over Liam crossed over to the other side of the desk. He opened the rather large file that said Liam Walter Barnes. It had various documents with stamps that had dates and seals and signatures. He flipped through it frantically, hoping for some further confirmation. He saw a document about his latest hospital admission and started peeling back the pages, racing through them faster and faster. His hospital admission from 1981 listed the reason for admission as: “critical condition … asphyxia … severe lacerations … concussion”
His later admissions were for:
“PTSD … Bipolar Disorder … Delusions … Depression … Paranoia … suppression of memories”
It was a long list, enough to justify turning his medicine cabinet into a pharmacy. The asphyxiation part made his heart beat so fast that he fell to his knees remembering not the dream and not what Dr. Miller had told him but the real, final truth.
He just stared up at the sun behind the gently waving branches of the birch tree until the boy from the picture looked down at him, blocking out the light. Liam had just been pushed from the top of the tree, but he had managed to hang on until his branch snapped loudly. Michael smiled when Liam fell and didn’t reach out for him or try to save him. He smiled the same way again as Liam was sprawled out on the ground with blood pooling around him and bones poking through his skin. Michael’s hands gripped Liam’s neck sending him into an adrenaline fueled panic attack. Liam was controlled by rage so completely that he was able to overpower his friend. The pain Michael had caused came rushing out of Liam’s hands, channeling the screaming voice of his vengeful mind. Liam gripped Michael’s neck and rolled him to the ground. He pressed harder and pushed his knee into the boy’s chest with all his weight, Liam’s blood spilling onto the suffocating boy’s T-shirt like hot syrup. Liam felt each pulse in the meaty part of his hands between his thumb and forefinger. It had a chugging flow, like the way a large bottle empties. It slowed down and Micheal’s fingernails withdrew from prying apart his stranglehold. It took a long time before Michael’s body was just still, and his hands released themselves and relaxed. Liam looked at what he had done and he just wailed and screamed but he couldn’t move. He didn’t know what a compound fracture was, but seeing a shattered bone sticking out of his leg and watching the hot crimson liquid pulse out was too much to bear.
Liam had a breakthrough. It really defined his next steps. That's the dream. That's the real one. Dr. Miller was right, he never had a brother. He heard a knock on the door and did nothing as he was completely paralyzed, his mind trying to compute an impossible reality. The knock came again and then Dr. Miller's assistant walked in without looking up from her schedule, not immediately noticing anything strange and said, “Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Miller, but your four o'clock appointment… ”
She saw Dr. Miller laying on the floor and turned around so fast that she hit her head on the door and knocked herself out. Now there were two bodies on the floor.
Liam looked at his hands and realized that his fingernails had bitten through his palms again. His whole body started shivering as the blood speckled the carpet squares on the floor beneath his fists. He had reached his goal now, delusional or not. He had emptied all of his boxes, he had poured them all out on the floor of Cassandra Miller’s office.
I had him. I swear I had him.
“You can't escape who you are,” Liam said out loud as he walked over to the unconscious assistant, his hands swelling open again, ready for their next grip.
D. C. Martin is an emerging writer who lives in Guelph, Ontario. He hates the winter and people who don’t signal lane changes. His writing is known for its quirky, endearing characters who find themselves in highly unexpected predicaments. Mr. Martin teaches Grade 4 and lives with his wife, daughter and cantankerous cat.