Austen 29

Night Life

By Catherine Austen

Content warning: Suicidal ideation

There’s a toaster on the coffee table. Janice is on her phone, smiling at a text, when the toast pops. And Maria wakes.

The bedroom crisps into focus. She’s alone in the house. Janice is gone.

She shuts her eyes and chases the dream. The toaster was white. The coffee table was wicker. Janice wore shorts. Or jeans with a hole in the knee? No. It’s gone.

She reaches for her journal and writes, Toaster popping, Janice on phone. White toaster. Loud pop. It’s been seven months since Janice died and two since Maria started seeking her in dreams. She gets out of bed and feeds the stupid dog and puts the stupid garbage out and goes to a stupid meeting.

“The second year is harder,” Tanya warns the newest member of the grief group. Maria has forgotten his name—Ben or Tim. He joined last week, a few days after his son overdosed. “Doctor’s orders,” he explained. He smiles when he speaks and looks pained when he listens. His grief is so fresh, it’s contained in disbelief. Soon it will spill and spread to permeate the world. “I can’t believe it gets harder,” he says, smiling.

Maria shares her dream, and everyone talks at once about some happy dream they can’t get back to.

“I don’t dream about my son anymore,” Antoine says, and the group hushes. His face sags with five thousand days of grief. “I’m glad for that. The waking is too awful.”

“The dreams are worth it,” Maria says. “You can learn to control them. It’s like tapping into another world.”

Tanya gently tugs back control. “This world gets better eventually. Hours go by when I don’t think of the twins. And when I do, I’m grateful for the time I had. We can all get there.”

They’re all parents, all stricken in the same place. Tanya’s twins died in a car crash eight years ago. Accidents can be easier for parents than overdoses or suicides, but it depends on the griever, whether she’s better at giving or receiving blame.

Janice was beaten to death in an ally. They didn’t want to tell Maria how long her daughter lay dying, but it came out at the inquest. The idea of hours passing without thinking of her—Maria shakes her head. She doesn’t want that. She wants the dreams.

Getting to sleep is the hardest part for a grieving oneironaut. Pills hinder recall so Maria stopped taking them. She refilled her prescription but stores the bottles in the night table drawer, beneath her dream journal and a photo of her and Janice on the beach, their bare arms squished together to fit into the selfie. That’s where she’ll travel tonight.

She closes her eyes and sees Janice in the alley, not dead yet.

There are people who get over this, she thinks. Or through it. It gets worse and worse until you’re a ghost, you’re one with your loss. She tries to conjure the beach in her mind’s eye as she repeats her mantra, “Clarity.”

Her son Dale is at the grief meeting when she arrives. He’s sitting in a plastic chair scrolling through his texts, a smile on his face. Maria halts in the doorway, unsure if this is a dream.

Dale sees her and waves. “Hey, Ma! Thanks for telling me about this. I think it’s really going to help, yeah?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Of course you can be here.”

They sit together, and when Dale shares with everyone how much he misses his sister, Maria forces herself to pat his knee.

She’s downcast after the meeting but perks up when Dale passes her a bag of weed. He says it’ll help her sleep. She holds it to her chest.

“So we’re having that thing for Natasha’s birthday,” he says.

Her smile vanishes.

“You have to come, Ma. See the baby. And us. We feel like we’re losing you.”

To maintain lucidity in a dream, you have to modulate your emotions. Anxiety, outrage, a sudden urge to slap your son’s face—such things will cause you to wake. Learning to calm down is essential, so she practices that now, her eyes locked with Dale’s, which are the same colour as Janice’s, green with a blue ring. They’re so exactly similar, the notion that Janice is trapped inside Dale’s eyes passes through Maria’s mind in a flash of terror and her hands rise toward his face. But that’s insane, a voice inside her says, so she turns the gesture into a hug.

He’s so solid. Muscle and bone. Heart, breath, all systems go. He squeezes her gently and she pulls away.

She offers three nods and a brief assurance. “You’re not losing me.”

Look at your hands throughout the day. Ask, Is this a dream? Press your right finger to your left palm and feel for resistance. Turn your hand over. Is this a dream?

“Want to hold her?” Dale asks.

She hesitates, and in the corner of her eye she sees Natasha, Dale’s wife, stiffen. “I don’t trust myself,” she says.

Dale winces. “Ah Mom. She’s your granddaughter.”

She stares at the infant in his arm and molds her face into a smile. “She’s beautiful.”

The baby is homely—a huge forehead, deep-set eyes, tiny mouth that opens and closes like a fish, creepy tuft of black hair, jerking limbs. Maria doesn’t want to touch it. Nothing feels related to her anymore.

She presses her finger into her palm. It resists completely.

She reaches toward the baby’s hair but retracts before contact. “Clarity,” she whispers.

She recalls holding her hand to Janice’s fevered head twenty years ago. Bathing her, tying shoes, turning pages. Hands are so practical. She looks at hers, backs, palms—it’s a trick to stabilize a lucid dream that begins to lose focus. It doesn’t work on reality.

“Are you getting enough sleep?” Dale asks. “You’re not high, are you?”

Natasha snatches the baby and hurries away. The living room is crowded with their friends. The coffee table is littered with paper plates smeared with icing. Maria should clear those up. It’s Natasha’s 30th birthday. It was kind of them to invite her.

“I find it difficult to feel my feelings for the baby,” she tells her son.

He kisses the top of her head. “It’s gonna take time. But there’s good things in the world still. You gotta be here with us.”

She nods. All she wants to do is go to sleep.

She’s filing papers at work, customer pre-orders she forgot to date, a huge stack printed in a tiny font that she struggles to read, when she thinks, I don’t have to do this because this is a dream. Janice laughs from the back of the store. Maria can’t see her, but she knows that Janice is hefting a 30-pound bag of kibble onto a pile. It’s a sale. All the regulars are coming. And this is a dream. Joy bubbles inside her. She feels the world shimmer, slipping from her grasp. Clarity, she thinks, and the room stabilizes. Her hands are as smooth as a child’s. She rests them on the black speckled countertop. It feels solid, but this is a dream. All she has to do to see her daughter is walk down the aisle.

She picks up speed, and her excitement wakes her. She’s barely caught a glimpse of Janice’s shoulder when she’s ripped into reality. The stupid bed, the stupid clock, the stupid dog.

She closes her eyes and struggles for details. It was evening. There were keys on the counter. Janice had her back turned. A blue shirt? Or grey? It’s gone.

All she knows is she was happy in the dream.

Her ex-husband Liam is at the grief meeting with Dale and they’ve saved her a seat. It would be rude not to join them. “You’re looking well,” Liam tells her.

Maria nods. “How’s Corinne?”

He shrugs. “Fine. Trying to be supportive. Should I bring her?”

“No.” Liam left her for Corinne six years ago. Janice was still living at home, and he left them.

“I miss her,” he says.

“Me too,” Dale says, leaning forward to join the conversation.

“I saw her in my dream this morning,” Maria says softly.

“Oh my god, so did I!” Dale shakes his head. “The waking is so sad.”

Maria smooths her jeans with her hands. “But it’s worth it, I find. It feels like a blessing to see her.”

“I guess,” Dale says.

Liam stares at Maria appraisingly, then leans into her arm as if they’re still friends. “But it’s just a dream, right? You know it’s not really her.”

She squints at him. “I’m not crazy. It’s just nice to see her.” She presses her finger into her palm. “If nothing else, it helps me sleep.”

“Sleep is good,” Dale says. “Nothing like having a baby to teach you that.”

Liam smiles.

“The dreams are divine,” Maria says softly. They have no idea if this is hyperbole.

“It feels like it’s really her, doesn’t it?” Dale says. “Can ghosts… visit you… in dreams?” he says aloud as he types the question into his phone. He nods as he scrolls the search results. “They’re called visitations. The jury’s out on what they mean.”

“They’re not ghosts!” Liam shouts.

Across the room, Antoine spills the coffee he’s pouring. Tanya takes her seat in the circle and clears her throat.

“Who knows what dreams really are?” Dale says.

“They’re nonsense,” Liam snaps. “Random combinations that we make into a story when we wake up.” He waits for someone to agree. “But it’s okay,” he capitulates eventually, nodding for all of them. “If you dream of her and it makes you happy, that’s okay. So long as you’re living in the real world.”

“I’m right here,” Maria says. “I’m here every week.” She looks at her hands—backs, palms. “But if the only path to happiness is in the dream world.…” She doesn’t know how to continue that sentence.

“Let’s begin,” Tanya says.

“Lucidity doesn’t always persist,” Yannis announces, and Maria wonders if she missed something. She’s joined a beginner class of dream navigation, found it in the city listings next to swimming and tai chi. The teacher’s voice is hypnotic and she keeps drifting inward.

“We can be swept back into the dream,” Yannis warns. He looks like a storybook Christ—light brown skin, long hair and beard, loose beige clothing. He gesticulates as he talks, walking around the room, laying a hand on each student’s chair as he passes. “We must try to remain lucid, but not try so hard that we wake. We must walk a tightrope of awareness.” His smile is dazzling as he repeats the phrase. “A tightrope of awareness.”

He leads them through a process of intention-setting, the first of six keys to lucidity. “Focus on where you want to be in the dream. Picture a place and intend to be there.”

Maria knows this from her books, but she nods gratefully.

“Don’t be afraid,” Yannis says to her alone. “The dream is yours. Take control.”

The night is a series of failures. Encounters she can’t recall, flashes of awareness she can’t maintain, hours in the darkness aching for sleep. She should take a pill but she needs clarity.

At dawn, she clings to lucidity briefly. She’s at a party with strangers when she thinks, This is a dream and I need to find Janice. She searches rooms full of luggage. A door leads into the pet shop, where Janice stands with her back turned, signing for an order. “Go away, Mom.” And Maria wakes.

“What does it mean?” she asks Dale when he calls. “Why is she always in the store? Why won’t she look at me?”

“Ah Ma, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a dream.”

She needs to stop waking up, that’s the problem. She needs to stay calm. She skips the grief group and drops into a yoga class instead. She’s like a true yogi, she tells herself, not here for fitness or stress relief but in preparation for the hard work that lies before her. She falls asleep during end relaxation and dreams of Janice.

When she returns to work, her cashier smiles. “That group’s really helping you. I’m so glad. We were worried.”

Maria’s face twitches but she lets it go as she recalls her dream—Janice heading upstairs telling her not to worry. She’s getting closer to contact.

Eagerness permeates the afternoon. Every customer leaves with a smile on their face.

“We need to find a new cookie supplier,” her assistant manager says as she grabs her coat. “The old couple are retiring.”

She nods and hangs her purse on her shoulder.

“So can you do that?” he asks. He’s on the floor, pricing trays of canned dog food.

“Can’t you do that?” she says.

He squints up at her. “No. I do everything now. I do the grooming, the ordering, the stocking. I’m tired of it. I make sixty-five cents above minimum wage.”

She looks toward the back of the store. No one’s there.

He slams a can on the shelf and mutters, “You have got to get your shit together.”

She goes to Thursday’s grief meeting and recommends lucid dreaming. “Not for escape,” she says. “For connection.”

“To what?” Antoine asks.

“Maybe there’s a therapeutic side to dreams,” Tanya says. “But we all come back to the world, Maria. Whatever dreams might be, this world is real. And this is the world we have to deal with.”

“But why?” Maria asks.

The room falls silent.

They’re all so sad, she thinks. She has access to a new energy, a vibrant realm they could all access if they weren’t so stubborn.

“There are natives in the dream world,” Yannis tells his workshop participants, who’ve dwindled to six this week. “Not everyone is welcoming,” he warns.

“I’m still having trouble with recall,” Maria says. The other students mutter in agreement.

“I have a checklist,” an older woman tells her, Sally or Suzanne—Maria has lost the ability to remember names. “Things you ask to stir details. Was it daytime? What colour dominated?”

“I always notice the colour,” Maria says.

Sally or Suzanne nods happily. “Dreams are livid, aren’t they? I have livid dreams but not lucid dreams.”

They laugh together and for a moment, Maria is present and not thinking of Janice. And in the following moment, she knows it’s possible to move on from grief. She could be a normal person one day. All she has to do is accept that Janice will never be found anywhere again. She’s passed away. Everything that has ever happened is over now.

When her mind returns to the workshop, Yannis is sharing tricks for remembering dream fragments. Wake slowly. Don’t move. Keep your eyes closed. Roll to your side and try again. “The longer you practice, the more coherent your dreams will be. And lucidity will come. It might take months, but it will come.”

“Months?” Maria repeats.

He smiles. “Even then, most of your dreams will not be lucid. I recall maybe one lucid dream a week?”

“That’s not enough,” Maria says. He laughs, but she argues. “Just because you can’t recall lucid dreams doesn’t mean you’re not having them. I always feel like I was awake in the dream, but I just can’t remember it afterward.”

“Yes, well, that’s an existential question, right?” Yannis replies joyfully. “You might have a dozen other lives in other dimensions, but what does it matter if you can’t remember them here?”

“It matters while it’s going on! If you never woke up out of it, it would still be happening and it would matter.”

“But we do wake up, I’m happy to say, and when we wake, we want to remember details.” He turns away from her, chuckling.

He’s just dicking around, Maria realizes. He spends his dreamtime flying and having sex with celebrities. He has nothing to teach her.

She wakes with the alarm and reaches for her journal and sees that her hand is as smooth as paper. This is a dream, she thinks. Pop music plays from Janice’s bedroom down the hall. Maria tries to rise but the bedcovers constrict her legs. She’ll never reach her. But this is a dream, she tells herself, and I don’t have to be here. She wakes and reaches for her journal. Her hand is as smooth as paper. Pop music plays down the hall. The covers pin her legs.

Maria’s heart flutters wildly. She screams but it’s just a hoarse whisper. Janice laughs riotously down the hall.

Maria wakes in terror. The dog is nestled against her legs. The sun is rising. The dream is over, and Janice is dead.

The laughter, the covers, the music, all descend into the dream world and by the time she remembers to remember them, all that’s left is certainty that something is waiting for her. She cries—just a few sputters, no tears. She hasn’t cried for weeks. The dog looks up with concern.

She reaches for her journal and remembers that moment in her dream. Music. Laughter. Janice in her bedroom. Maria didn’t find her because she kept waking up.

She’s read about false awakenings. More than one causes panic, they say, a terror of spending eternity grasping for something real. But Maria doesn’t feel that fear at all. The panic of her dream lingers in her blood, but she feels it as the panic of leaving, not staying. It would be stupid to fear that she might never wake. It’s the waking that’s awful. The dream is divine. They have it all wrong with the goal of remembering. The goal should be to stay in the dream.

You are what you let yourself become reads a poster in the office where she’s clearing out her desk. Her control of her dream world coincides with the derailment of her waking life, and she couldn’t give a shit. That’s what she says when her assistant manager asks, “So are we closing?”

“I don’t give a shit.”

She goes home and listens to messages on her machine. A supplier has concerns about a loyalty promotion that her store discontinued. I don’t give a shit. Tanya says the grief group misses her. I don’t give a shit.

She doesn’t say it out loud when Dale drops by with the baby in his arms. “Hey Ma, we miss you.”

She lets them in.

The house is a mess—blankets on the couch, a sleeping bag beside the dining table, empty granola bar wrappers piled beside the dog bed. Dale doesn’t comment but he’s afraid to put the baby down. “Do you have a sheet or something I could lay her on?”

Maria composes herself in the linen closet and returns with a smile. “This is all part of my dream workshop,” she explains. “We practice sleeping in different positions to see what helps.”

“Sure, yeah.” He lays the baby in the centre of a paisley flannel sheet and sits beside her on the floor, one hand on her tiny arm. She wears yellow cotton pyjamas spotted with white sheep. She’s getting bigger, growing into her forehead. She’s less homely when she’s sleeping, Maria thinks. She notices these things. She’s present now, and this is not a dream.

“So you’re still doing that?” Dale asks. “The dream thing?”

“The program, yes.”

“And you control your dreams?”

“Sometimes. I’m learning from it.”

“And what have you learned?”

He’s sad, she realizes, not angry. He’s aging prematurely. She’s not sure what month it is. His birthday’s coming up. She might have missed it. “Maybe the subconscious is not the library of darkness we’ve all been taught,” she says. “Maybe there’s light there.”

“Jesus, Mom, I’m worried about you.”

“Oh my god, don’t worry about me! I’m eating well, sleeping well. I do yoga nidra, reality checks, the whole program. I’m just trying a little too hard. I need more sleep, that’s all.”

“I’m not worried about your dream progress! I’m worried about your health. Your mental and physical health. I’m worried about you in the real world.”

“The dream world is real too,” she says. “There’s a cultural bias toward the waking state but the dream state is just as real. I experience it, so it’s real.”

“I’ve experienced an acid trip. It wasn’t real.”

“It was real while you experienced it. Wherever our awareness is, that’s real.”

“Okay, but it’s in your head and no one else’s. It’s not a reality anyone can share. It’s totally isolated.”

She squints. “It doesn’t feel isolated. This world feels isolated. The dream world feels like communion.”

“This is how people go crazy, Ma. It’s not healthy. Where’s Squirt?”

She looks around for the dog. “Outside? Yes. Outside.” She rises and checks that the dog is in the yard. She fills the water dish and food bowl. “You think I’m a lotus-eater,” she says when she returns to the couch.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You think I’m living in a dream world.”

“Obviously you’re living in a dream world. It’s your aspiration.”

She smiles. “I just want to find Janice.”

He cocks his head this way and that, in hope of eye contact. “I love you, Mom. And I know you’re in pain. But I’m your son. And I’m alive. And you don’t even want to see me.”

The baby stirs. Dale removes his hand from her arm. “You know she was my sister, right? My baby sister. I’m grieving too.”

Maria smooths her hands on her thighs. She’s wearing pyjamas, she notices. She has no idea when she last showered. Dale is on her floor waiting for a response. This is not a dream. “You could try lucid dreaming,” she suggests. “There’s more to it than people think. I don’t know if it taps into an afterlife, but I know Janice is there.”

“Where?” Dale shouts. “Where exactly is she, Ma? Jesus.”

Maria starts laughing. It’s as if she’s piloted by some other consciousness.

“Oh my god, Ma, you need help. Do you even remember what life with Janice was like? You complained about her all the time. Everything she did, you told her was a mistake. You kicked her out how many times? Even when she lived here, you never spent time with her. That’s the grief behind your dream shit. Not that she’s gone, not that she suffered, but that you wasted all the time you had with her. And now you’re wasting the rest of it. You need to get a grip.”

“I’d like you to leave,” she says, rising. She looks at her hands. Backs, palms.

“This is not a dream!” Dale shouts. “This is your life!”

The baby wakes with a cry.

“It’s all life,” Maria says.

The bridge between waking and sleeping is long and foggy tonight. Janice is waiting somewhere beyond awareness, but Maria will find her in a dream if she just has enough time. She’s taken all her hoarded pills over the past several hours and she took the time to write a note. She asked Liam to take care of Janice’s dog. She told Dale that she loves him. She knows that her body will pass from life into death while she’s in the dream world, but she wanted to assure them that her spirit will still be there, alive in a dream, opening a door to a room where Janice is laughing, and that’s exactly where she wants to be. They shouldn’t grieve her loss. And if anyone wants to get in touch, they know where they can find her.

She closes her eyes and snuggles into the blanket and says to herself, “Clarity.”

Catherine Austen writes from Gatineau, Quebec. Her books have won the Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult Book Award and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Prize for Children’s Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, The Fiddlehead, and many other journals. Learn more at CatherineAusten.com.