The Collection

Her expression remained serious. 'I mean it. You have to go to the doctor and find out what this is.'

'I know what it is.'

She was shaking her head before he even finished the sentence. 'I'm tired of hearing that. Just go to the doctor. Be practical for once.'

He let it drop. She fussed around the room for a few moments more, regurgitating her mother's sickbed advice, and went back out to the kitchen to finish preparing the formula.  He sat up against the headboard after she'd gone. The headache was better already. The Tylenol worked fast.

He stared at the wall opposite the bed, at the cluster of Impressionist prints Cindy had mounted and framed last winter in a frenzy of decorating madness. She had (or they had, under her direction) also repainted the living room, converting the sterile white-white to a warmer off-white, and had drilled holes into the ceilings of each room in order to accommodate her new menagerie of hanging plants. The entire house had virtually been transformed over the space of a single weekend.

He heard Cindy's quick step clicking down the hardwood floor of the hall from the kitchen to the nursery, where Anne was busily crawling around her playpen, waiting for her dinner. Or her first dinner, to be more precise. There were two more to come.

Marc smiled. Babies were a pain. They cut into sleep time and recreation time. But they were worth it. He closed his eyes for a second ...... and opened them in blackness. Cindy was sleeping soundly beside him, her bare back pressed against his chest. She had taken his clothes off somehow, while he was asleep, and they were carefully folded over the back of an antique chair. His headache was gone, but his brain was not still. The demon phantasms of a particularly vivid nightmare were imprinted onto the backs of his pupils. He saw them wildly reeling around the room even as he noted the firm substance of reality about him. There was a woman, not un­like Cindy but with torn ragged hair and misshapen grinning teeth, who was somehow, in some way, trying to kill a low-slung scuttling monster.

The images frightened him, made him afraid to get out of bed, made him want to fall back asleep, made him unable to fall back asleep. He could see them, or feel them, sneaking around the edges of the room, hiding in shadows just out of range of his peripheral vision. He wanted to wake Cindy up, to have her comfort his nightmare fears the way his sister used to, but something held him back. Instead, he reached over and ran his fingers through the thin part in her silken brown hair, the part which remained perfectly straight and untouched even through the dishevelment of sleep. She stirred under his touch, her back snuggling even closer against him, and he ran his hand down the soft flesh of her thin arm. Deja vu.

He pulled his arm back quickly; so quickly that Cindy shifted from her side to her stomach, uttering some incom­prehensible moan, before settling back down into deep sleep. He lay there staring at her. The feeling had been so strong, so powerful, so instantaneous, that he had experi­enced a moment of panic, of intuitive fear. He had done this before. He had lain there on this night, in this position, and had stroked her bare arm in exactly the same way. A certain amount of deja vu was inevitable in a married relationship, he knew. There are only a finite number of things two peo­ple can do within the limited space of a bed. But this had been different. This had been ... frightening. But why? What had-? He had dreamed it. The answer came immediately and incontrovertibly. He could feel the beginnings of a headache stirring in the back 1 of his skull. He closed his eyes, thought of nothing, thought of blackness, thought of emptiness. He tried to fall asleep.

He knew he would remember none of this in the morning.

Marc awoke with the alarm clock. But the clock did notsay six thirty; it said eight o'clock. Cindy was standing over him smiling, a glass of orange juice in one hand and a half eaten slice of toast in the other. 'I decided to let you sleep in,' she said. 'How's your head?'

He shook it, to test for pain. There was none. 'Fine,' he said.

She sat down next to him on the bed. 'She was so good last night, you never would've believed it was her. Didn't I cry or anything. I fed her her food and she went instantly to sleep. Just like a little angel.'

Marc smiled. 'Figures. Now that it's my turn, she'll probably be up all night screaming.'

Cindy laughed. 'Probably.' She leaned over to kiss him; her lips tasted faintly of orange juice and peanut butter. 'You going to work today?'

'Hell no.' He leaned back on the pillow, stretching. 'It's another 'staff development' day. Last thing I need is to put up with that crap.'

'Good. We'll go on a picnic then. Me, you, and Anne. Our first family outing.'

'We've been to the doctor. We've been to the store.'

'Those aren't family outings.'

'What are they?'

She socked him playfully on the arm. 'Just get dressed.'

They spent the day at the zoo, and although his headache came back around noon, Marc didn't say anything. He kept smiling, ignored it, and in another hour it had almost completely disappeared. There was one bad moment in the rep­tile house-a momentary flashback to a nonexistent dream-time that caused the peach fuzz hairs on the back of his neck to bristle-but it passed as soon as they moved on to the next exhibit.

They got back in time for Anne's midafternoon feeding. The baby had slept through three-fourths of the zoo trip, had slept in the car on the way there and on the way back, and she fell asleep again almost immediately after her bottle. Cindy put her into the crib in their bedroom, and they made love on the living room floor, with the drapes open, the way they used to.

After dinner, Marc announced that he was going to go to bed. Cindy asked if he was still sick, if his headache had come back, but he smiled and said no, he just wanted to get enough rest to go to work tomorrow. He did not mention that he wanted to get in at least four or five hours of sleep before waking up to take care of the baby. He did not mention Anne's sleeping schedule at all. He did not want to jeopard­ize the peace they had made.

Cindy said she would stay up a while longer; there was an old James Bond movie she wanted to see, one of the Connery Bonds. She would wake him when it was time to feed the baby.

He walked down the hall to the bedroom, left his clothes in a discarded pile on the floor, and crawled into bed. He could hear Anne's thin breathing from the crib at the foot of the bed, whistling low beneath the rhythmic babble from Cindy's TV. He switched off the lamp on the walnut night-stand next to his head and closed his eyes, letting the baby's breath and the TV's talking lull him to sleep.

The dream was strange. Something to do with a small dark closeted room and a wide expanse of unbroken plain.

The room was filled with furtive shadows, its blackness bro­ken periodically by flashing red and blue lights. The plain was completely devoid of all life, and its sandy floor was al­ternately yellow and white. The two were connected some' how, intertwined with the movements and actions of a terrifyingly evil clown.

Cindy woke him up, as promised, in time for the baby's feeding. Feeling her hands roughly shake him awake, he rolled onto his side and looked at her with half-shut eyes. 'You're up already,' he said. 'You feed her.'

Her voice was as sleepy as his. 'I'm not up. And it's your turn.'

'But you woke me up.'

'And the alarm woke me up. It's an even trade.'

His sleep-numbed brain could not grasp the logic, but he got out of bed anyway, slipping into his robe and lurching down the hallway to the kitchen. Once there, he took a baby bottle from the purifier, a nipple from the drawer, and heated the formula over the stove. The simple act of movement, the sheer effort of standing for several minutes on his feet while he stirred the Similac on the stove, caused him to wake up somewhat. And he was conscious, if not fully alert, as he made his way back down the hall to the bedroom.

Cindy, of course, was fast asleep by the time he returned, and he left the bedroom lights off so as not to disturb her. She had moved the crib from the foot of the bed to a spot right next to her, and he walked around to her side of the bed, holding the warm bottle tightly. He placed the bottle on top of the nightstand and reached into the crib for Anne. He hugged his daughter to him.

The slatted shafts of moonlight which fell through the partially open curtains illuminated the baby's face, and Marc saw the red mouth painted garishly onto her cheesecloth head. One of her eyes was missing, but the other eye-a sewed-on black button-stared knowingly into his. The baby's rag-stuffed arms hung limply at her sides, and her cotton doll legs swung loosely in the air.

Marc held the baby lovingly in his arms. He picked up the bottle from the nightstand and pressed it to her painted lips. The formula dripped down her face, some of it falling onto the floor, the rest being absorbed by the