The Dream Thieves

“Transient global amnesia,” Helen replied. She had listened to the phone conversation and following discussion with great interest. Helen very much enjoyed climbing down into other people’s lives and muddling about there with a pail and a shovel and possibly one of those old-fashioned striped bathing suits with the legs and arms. “Two- to six-hour episodes. Can’t remember anything past the last minute. But the victims — that was Foz’s word, not mine — apparently know they’re losing time while it’s happening.”

“That sounds dreadful,” said Mrs. Gansey. “Does it get worse?”

Helen doodled on the desk blotter with a two-inch pencil. “Apparently not. Some people only have one episode. Some people get them all the time, like migraines.”

“And it’s stress related?” Richard Gansey II broke in. Although he didn’t know Adam well, his concern ran deep and genuine. Adam was his son’s friend, and so he had inherent worth. “Dick, do you know what he might be stressed about?”

It was clear this was a problem that all of the Ganseys were intent on solving before Gansey returned to Henrietta with Adam.

“He just moved out of his parents’ house,” Gansey said. He had started to say trailer, but he didn’t like to think of what his own parents would do with that visual. He thought for a moment and then added, “His father beat him.”

“Jesus Christ,” his father remarked. Then: “Why do they let these people breed?”

Gansey just looked at his father. For a long moment, nothing was said.

“Richard,” his mother chastised.

“Where is he staying now?” his father asked. “With you?”

He couldn’t know how much or why this question smarted. Gansey shook his head. “I tried. He’s staying at a room that belongs to St. Agnes — a local church.”

“Is it legal? Does he have a car?”

“He’ll be eighteen in a few months. And no.”

“It would be better if he stayed with you,” Richard Gansey II observed.

“He won’t. He just won’t. Adam has to do everything himself. He won’t take anything that looks like a handout. He’s paying his own way through school. He works three jobs.”

The other Gansey faces were approving. The family as a whole enjoyed charm and pluck, and this idea of Adam Parrish, self-made man, appealed to them immensely.

“But he has to have a car,” Mrs. Gansey said. “That would surely help. Can we not give him a little something to help him get one?”

“He won’t take it.”

“Oh, surely if we say —”

“He won’t take it. I promise you, he will not take it.”

They thought for a long moment, during which Helen drew her name in large letters and his father paged through A Brief Encyclopedia of World Pottery and his mother discreetly looked up transient global amnesia on her phone and Gansey contemplated just throwing everything he possessed into the Suburban and driving away as fast as he could. A very small, very selfish voice inside Gansey whispered, What if you left him here, what if you made him find his own way back; what if he had to call you and apologize for once?

Finally, Helen said, “What if I gave him my old college car? The crappy one I’m going to donate to that broken-car charity if he doesn’t want it. He’d be saving me the trouble of arranging the tow!”

Gansey frowned. “Which crappy car?”

“Obviously I would obtain one,” Helen replied, drawing a fifty-eight-foot-yacht on the blotter. “And say it was mine.”

The older Ganseys adored the idea. Mrs. Gansey was already on the phone. The collective mood had buoyed with the implementation of this plan. Gansey felt it would take more than a car to relieve Adam’s stress, but the truth was that he did need a vehicle. And if Adam really did buy Helen’s story, it wouldn’t hurt a damn thing.

Gansey couldn’t shake the image of Adam by the side of the interstate, walking, walking, walking. Knowing he was forgetting what he was doing, but unable to stop. Unable to remember Gansey’s number, even when people did stop to help.

I don’t need your wisdom, Gansey.

So there was nothing he could do about it.

43

Okay, princess,” Kavinsky said, presenting a six-pack to Ronan. “Show me what you can do.”

They were back in the clearing near the fairgrounds. It was hazy, shimmering, dazed in the heat. This was a place for more dream math. One hundred white Mitsubishis. Two dozen fake licenses. Two of them.

One day.

Two? Three?

Time had no meaning. Days were irrelevant. They marked

time with dreams.

The first one had been just a pen. Ronan woke in the frosty air-conditioning of the passenger seat, his fingers motionless over a slender plastic pen balanced on his chest. As always, he hovered above himself, a paralyzed non-participant in his own life. The speaker thumped out something that sounded goodnatured, offensive, and Bulgarian. Biting flies clung hopefully to the exterior of the windshield. Kavinsky wore his white sunglasses, because he was awake.

“Wow, man, this is . . . a pen.” Taking the pen from beneath Ronan’s unprotesting fingers, Kavinsky tried it out on the dashboard. There was something dazzling about his total disregard for his own property. “What’s this shit, man? Looks like the Declaration of Independence.”

Just as in the dream, the pen wrote everything in a dainty cursive, no matter how the user held it. Kavinsky quickly bored of its single-minded magic. He tapped the pen on Ronan’s teeth along with the Bulgarian beat until feeling came back to Ronan’s hands and he was able to knock it away.

Ronan thought it wasn’t bad for a dream object produced on command. But Kavinsky regarded the pen scornfully.

“Watch this.” Producing a green pill, he flicked it into his mouth and washed it down with some beer. Pulling off his sunglasses, he pressed his knuckles into one of his eyes, grimacing. Then he was asleep.

Ronan watched him sleep, head thrown to the side, tapping pulse visible through the skin of his neck.

Kavinsky’s pulse stopped.

And then, with a violent start, Kavinsky jerked awake, one of his hands fisted. His mouth cracked into a grin at Ronan’s surprise. With a theatric twist of his hand, he presented his dream object. A pen cap. He twitched his fingers until Ronan handed over the dream-pen.

The cap, of course, fit perfectly. Right size, right color, right sheen to the plastic. And why shouldn’t it be perfect? Kavinsky was known for his forgery.

“Amateur,” Kavinsky said. “This is the way to dream back Gansey’s balls for him.”

“Is this going to be a thing?” Ronan demanded. He was angry, but not as angry as he would’ve been before he started drinking. He put his fingers on the door handle, ready to get out. “Like, is this going to be what’s funny to you? Because I don’t want this that bad. I can figure it out myself.”

“Sure you can,” Kavinsky said. He cocked a finger at him. “Give him that pen. Write him a little note with it. In fucking George Washington letters, ‘Dear Dick, drive this, ex-oh-ex-oh. Ronan Lynch.’ ”

Ronan wasn’t sure if it was Kavinsky using his real name or the refreshed memory of the ruined Pig that did it, but he dropped his hand from the door. “Leave Gansey out of this.”

Kavinsky made a whoo shape with his mouth. “Gladly, Lynch. Here’s the deal. You get your stuff from the same place every time, right?”

The forest. “Mostly.”

“Go back there. Don’t go anywhere else. Why would you want to go anywhere else? You wanna go where your shit’s at. That’s where you go. You’re thinking of what you want before you go to sleep, right? You know it’s gonna be there, in that place. Don’t let it know you’re there. It’ll change on you if you do. You’ve gotta be in and out, Lynch.”

“In and out,” Ronan repeated. It didn’t sound like a dream he’d ever had.

“Like a motherfucking thief.”

Kavinsky revealed another two green pills in his hand. One he kept for himself. The other he offered to Ronan.

“See you on the other side?”

Fall asleep. Yes, you fall asleep. You are awake and then you close your eyes and thoughts press in and lucidity invades but then, eventually, you teeter on the edge of slumber and fall.

Ronan did not fall asleep. He swallowed the green pill and he was thrown into sleep. Hurled into it. Dashed, wrecked, destroyed into sleep. He rolled onto that shore a crushed version of himself, his legs gone beneath him. The trees leaned over him. The air grinned. Thief? He had been robbed.

In

Out

There was the object he had planned to take. Was it? He couldn’t tell what it was. The trees wrapped their branches around it. Orphan Girl tugged and tugged.

In

Out

Kavinsky’s voice, very clear: “Dying’s a boring side effect.”

Ronan snatched the metal of the thing. Inside him, a ventricle jerked restlessly. Blood poured into his empty atria of his heart.

“GET OUT!” screamed Orphan Girl.

His eyelids flashed open.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, sailor.” Kavinsky leaned over him. “Remember: You take the pill, or it’ll take you.”

Ronan couldn’t move. Kavinsky gave his chest a supportive thump of the fist.

“You’re all right,” he said amiably. He poured some beer into Ronan’s unprotesting lips and finished it himself. The sun looked strange outside the windshield, like time had passed, or the car had moved. “What the hell do you even have there?”

Ronan’s arms regained sensation. He held a metal cage with a tiny glass Camaro in it. It bore no resemblance to the boom box he’d planned to take out. It bore only a slightly better resemblance to the actual Camaro. Inside the glass car was an anonymous driver, his facial expression vaguely shocked.

“Dear Dick,” Kavinsky said. “Drive this!”

This time, Ronan laughed. Kavinsky showed him his own prize: a silver gun with the words DREAM KILLER engraved on the muzzle.

“You didn’t sneak in, did you?” he said accusingly. “Sneak in, sneak out. Get your stuff, get out. Before the place notices.”

“Fucking pill,” Ronan said.

“It’s a wonder drug. My mom loves the hell out of these, man. When she starts breaking shit in the house, I grind one of these for her. Put it in her smoothie. You can make a joke there, man. It’s easy. Go on. I left it wide open for you.”

“What is your place?”

Kavinsky set two more green pills on the dash; they danced and jittered along to the beat of the speakers. The song slyly told Ronan: Аре махай се, аре махай се, аре махай се. Kavinsky handed him a beer.

“My secret place? You want into my secret place?” Kavinsky howled a laugh. “I knew it.”

“Fine. Don’t tell me. You put pills in your mom’s drink?”

“Only when she steals my stuff. She wasn’t such a bitch back in Jersey.”