(A Short Story)
In the autumn of the year of her recovery, she wakened from a dream in which someone had been speaking to her, and it had seemed important, but she was unable to recall what had been said. Elaine had noticed a new sensitivity to light, sound, and touch, which she was unsure whether to attribute to a lingering side effect of the sickness or the result of having been confined to a darkened room for so long. She clearly remembered herself as she had been in the last days before she fell ill, never suspecting the sudden change that was about to take place. She felt like the same person she had been, only somehow—stretched? Or was it diminished? Even her own face in the mirror did not reveal the answer. Was she stronger for having overcome what everyone had said would be terminal, or would she forever be less than she could have been? She had had many hopes before disappearing into the netherworld of illness.
As the weeks went by, Elaine grew impatient to feel at home again in her own life, but the quality of reality itself seemed to have changed. People smiled at her and were kind, even people she didn’t know well. Everyone, even strangers, somehow seemed to understand that she’d been through something monstrous. It was curiously unsettling to be sitting in a restaurant or walking down the sidewalk and have a stranger give her what appeared to be a knowing look. What she at first attributed to the speed with which news of a calamity traveled she later began to think was simply odd. The city she lived in was not that small, so there seemed to be no explanation for the way in which the number of people who knew about her could have grown so large.
She was unsure sometimes whether people were speaking to her or to someone else; she found herself pondering pieces of overhead conversation that seemed inexplicably to have some meaning for her. I’m losing my mind, she thought to herself . . . But trying to ignore the sensation was only partially successful. Going home and lying down in the dark, away from people, was the very thing she didn’t want to do, and yet merely going to the grocery store was sometimes enough to exhaust her and drive her into seclusion for the remainder of the day.
Not long before her illness, she had been stalked by an acquaintance, and the strangeness of that experience remained with her, so that she was unable to tell if the feeling she had lately developed of having someone always watching her was an echo of that experience, or a new development. Something seemed constantly to be hovering just outside the corner of her eye, a vague presence, but when she looked straight at it, there was never anything there. Once, at the library, she had the impression of someone disappearing around a corner just as she was turning in that direction. Another time she caught sight of curtains twitching closed above her, just as she looked up, preparing to enter a friend’s apartment building. In both cases, she knew someone had been there, but she could not have given a single identifying detail. She did not feel threatened, exactly, but unsettled rather, and uncertain.
Once she found a purple calla lily on her windshield and could not determine how it had gotten there. Another time she was sure she heard a man’s voice call her name as she driving down a seemingly empty street, the second syllable trailing off mournfully as her forward momentum carried her away. Then there was the time she went to the Y, certain she had two bathing suits in her gym bag but only able to find one of them, no matter how thoroughly she searched pockets and compartments. Later that night, when she began to rearrange the contents of her bag, she found the missing suit and was unable to account for how she could have missed it earlier. It seemed to have been removed and then replaced, as strange as that explanation seemed.
She began to wake up in the mornings from dreams of having had someone with her throughout the night, some of which were mere impressions of a soft voice and an embrace, and some of which were electrically erotic, though the sheets and bedclothes were always exactly as they had been when she went to bed. She had no impression of anything in the room having been disturbed, but something in herself seemed to be stirring, like a slowly uncoiling snake. Once, on an unusually warm Indian summer night, she stayed out on the sleeping porch, awakening with an impression of stars being tangled in her hair and a crescent moon hanging from her ear. When she sat up and looked toward the backyard, orange and yellow leaves were eddying down from gently swaying branches, and there was a susurration in the air, a long-drawn out sigh, though the night was cloudy, and there was no moon. The night is alive, Elaine thought, wondering why that was true. And then she thought, why do I feel so strange?
Finally, she decided to tell her friend Moxie, one day over lunch, what had been happening. “You know, Moxie, if I didn’t know better, I’d say I have a ghostly lover. I don’t know how else to describe it,” she said, as they were lingering over coffee one damp November day. After she described the things that had taken place, Moxie, who was a physicist at the university and nobody’s fool, looked her right in the eye. “Well, you’ve already been through menopause, so we can eliminate hot flashes from the list of suspects.”
“Yes, I thought about that. It’s more like being an adolescent again, without the acne. Well, not quite that. It’s a little more mysterious.”
“An incubus?”
“Well, I hope not. I don’t know quite what that is, but it doesn’t sound like something sustainable.”
“I was going to ask you if you’d been reading “Kubla Khan” again.
Elaine laughed then. “Oh, ‘Beware, Beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair.’ Something like that, I suppose. But that could also describe a falling angel.”
“What does he look like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I can’t see him clearly,” said Elaine, who was not about to admit that she had glimpsed his face in her dreams and that he was spectacularly handsome. “I don’t know what I’ve got on my hands here, an overly active imagination, lingering effects of disease, or someone real who’s actually hanging on the margins of my life somehow. I don’t suppose either an angel or a demon can open the trunk of a car.”
“Well, that’s the part that makes it difficult for me to dismiss,” said Moxie, putting down her coffee cup. “I remember you putting that extra suit in the gym bag that day we were going to the beach because you didn’t know which one looked better. And how big can a gym bag be? It’s not bottomless, surely.”
“I don’t know, Moxie. Half the time it seems like this magical thing, something I hadn’t looked for at all, and half the time it reminds me of all that trouble I had with Josie following me around. Too ephemeral to put your finger on. Why would someone hover like that?”
“Everybody knows about your illness and all that business before. Maybe someone’s just a little hesitant.”
“Thanks for not dismissing it. I just wish I could figure out what’s happening and why.”
“I think we don’t have enough evidence to decide one way or the other,” Moxie said judiciously. “So we’ll just have to wait for further developments.” She was always practical. As indeed, Elaine had always considered herself to be.
Later that night, while driving home on the expressway, Elaine glanced at the freeway sign hanging over her lane. She was unable to say later whether it actually said, “You’re in my dreams, too” or “Two miles to Deane Street” because she was distracted by the sight of a falling star in her left field of vision. (She and Moxie had been discussing the Leonids meteor shower just a few hours previously, so this was not a totally unexpected event, just an astonishing one.) Ten miles farther on, she was passed by a fast-moving car in the next lane over. She had a chance to read “ILU VYU” on the license plate before the car sped away, disappearing into the night under a blue-black sky brimming with stars.
When she got out of the car in her driveway a few minutes later, a large shape detached itself from the shadows under the oak tree on the lawn and moved slowly away: a deer, crowned with antlers.
