Memory and Dream

Rolanda couldn’t shake the memory of that awful moment earlier this morning when the girl had run an Xacto blade across her hand, the sharp metal cutting deeply into the palm, but the wound hadn’t bled.

Hadn’t bled at all. What it had done was close up again as easily as you might seal a zip-lock plastic bag.

Hey presto, just like that.

It wasn’t possible, of course. What she’d seen couldn’t have happened. Except there was no denying that she had seen it and now the whole world had become unsafe. Nothing could be trusted to be as it once had been. The hard-wood floor of her apartment seemed spongy underfoot, the walls pulsed, the air was thick with light that appeared to have a physical consistency. Dust motes didn’t so much float in it as were encased. Everything was changed.

You think you’re safe, Rolanda thought, looking down at her sleeping charge. You think you know who you are and you’re content with the comfortable familiarity of your life, and then something like this comes along and the next thing you know, everything becomes foreign. It wasn’t just Cosette, lying there on her bed; it was that everything now had the potential to be other than what she always believed it to be.

This must be what people meant when they spoke of an epiphany, she thought, except she didn’t actually understand what she was seeing. She simply knew that there were no more safe corners to turn.

That underlying what everyone accepted as true was another truth. A different truth, one that allowed for god knew how many interpretations.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?”

She looked down to see that Cosette’s eyes were open, their luminous gaze regarding her sympathetically, and Rolanda realized that she no longer considered the girl as a potential client, in need of the Foundation’s services. Their roles hadn’t so much reversed as evened out so that they were meeting now as equals, each able to learn from the other.

“I don’t know what I am,” Rolanda admitted. “Everything seems changed. Anything seems possible.”

Cosette sat up and scooted over to where she could lean back against the headboard. “Except for happiness.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to be real.”

Rolanda smiled. “You sound like Pinocchio.”

“Who’s Pinocchio?”

“A little wooden puppet in a story who wanted to become a real boy.”

“And did he?”

“Eventually.”

Cosette leaned forward eagerly. “How did he do it?”

“It was just a story,” Rolanda said.

“But that’s what we all are—just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we’d just fade away.”

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

“When you’re real,” Cosette added, “your stories have more weight, I think. There’s less chance of being forgotten.”

“I don’t know about that. There are any number of characters from books and movies who are a lot more real to some people than anyone in their own life.”

“How did the puppet become real?”

Rolanda sighed. “I don’t remember exactly. I think it had something to do with his having to be a good boy. Doing good deeds. There was a fairy involved as well—except now I think I’m mixing up the book and the Disney film. I remember the fairy from the movie but I can’t remember if she was in the book. In the movie, she was the one who finally changed him into a real boy.”

Cosette was hanging on to her every word. “I wonder if Isabelle would paint a fairy like that for me.”

“You don’t need a fairy,” Rolanda said. “You’re already real.”

“I don’t dream. I don’t bleed.”

“Maybe that’s a blessing.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to feel so ... so hollow inside.”

“Perhaps,” Rolanda admitted. “But I think you’re making more of what other people feel than what they actually do. Lots of people go through their whole lives with a sense of being unfulfilled. Of feeling hollow.”

But Cosette wasn’t prepared to listen to that line of argument.

“I’ll do good deeds,” she said. “We’ll all do good deeds. And then when Isabelle paints the fairy for us, we’ll all become real. The red crow will beat its wings in our chests and we’ll dream and bleed just like you.”

“But—”

“I have to find Isabelle and ask her.”

She stood up on the bed and danced about excitedly, bouncing on the mattress, clapping her hands.

“Thank you, Rolanda!” she cried. “Thank you!”

Rolanda stood up. “Don’t get too excited,” she began. “That was only—”

But she spoke to herself. Her guest had disappeared, vanishing with a sudden whuft of displaced air.

Rolanda stared slack-jawed at the empty space above her bed.

“A story,” she finished softly.

She heard cries of astonishment rise up from downstairs, followed by the sound of the front door slamming. She made it to the window in time to see Cosette running off down the sidewalk. Something Cosette had said earlier echoed in her mind.

That’s what we all are—just stories.

She stared through the window, watching until the girl’s trim figure vanished from her field of vision, then slowly made her way down to the Foundation’s offices. The waiting room was in an uproar.

“—out of thin air, I swear—”

“—looked just like—”

“—not possible—”

Rolanda stood in the doorway, feeling as untouched by the noisy bewilderment of her coworkers and the children in the waiting room as though she were the calm eye in the center of a storm. She looked at the painting of The Wild Girl. There was no question but that Cosette had been the model. There was no question but that the world had changed on her and nothing would ever be the same again.

She had to speak to Isabelle Copley, she realized. She had to know where Cosette had come from, why she didn’t bleed, why she had weight and mass and presence but claimed she wasn’t real.

Shaun noticed her standing there in the doorway and called her name, but Rolanda ignored her coworker’s attention. Instead she retreated back up to her apartment. She put on her shoes and a jacket.

Stuck her wallet into a small waist pack and belted it on. And then she left the confusion behind.

She walked in the direction that Cosette had taken until she realized she had no idea where she was going. Stopping at the first phone booth along her way, she looked for Copley’s address in the white pages, but there was no listing. She thought for a moment, then looked up Alan Grant. She noted the number, but decided she wanted to speak to him in person, rather than over the phone. She wanted to be able to look him in the face before she decided how much she would tell him about what had brought her knocking on his door.

As she headed for Waterhouse Street she found herself wondering if he could dream, if he bled. If he was real. Or was he another story, like Cosette, strayed from some mysterious before? He’d never seemed any different from anybody else before, but then, Rolanda thought, up until last night, she’d never looked at anyone with the perspective she had now.

IV

Isabelle closed Kathy’s journal after having read the first twenty or so pages, unable to absorb any more in one sitting. Holding the book against her chest, she stared out the window of her studio. The view was quickly becoming familiar. The Kickaha River, the neighboring buildings, that line of rooftops across the water marching up from the slope of the riverbank into Ferryside like patches on a quilt ...