“I’m Aris, Benja’s emergency contact. I need to see my friend.”
“I’m Apollina. I’m the Interpreter. He’s in treatment right now. It’s almost finished. You just have to wait.” Her tone is dispassionate.
Aris feels like collapsing onto the floor.
Too late.
“Please, may I see him?” Aris asks, tempering her voice and holding her composure as best she can.
Apollina assesses Aris with her eyes, then nods. She leads her down a long corridor with curved white walls. Rows of doors line up like soldiers on both sides. There is no signage on them to denote their purposes.
The Interpreter opens a door. The room is dark. But there is light coming from a large window connecting it to another room. Through it Aris sees Benja lying still on a sleek white bed. Floating above him is a shiny copper apparatus the shape of a large cloud. It looks like something out of the Victorian era and takes up the space of the entire ceiling.
Hanging down from it like sheets of rain are numerous tubes of various colors. The tubes come together on a helmet connected to Benja’s head. Aris lifts her eyes to the copper cloud above him.
On it are images that shift and change like weather. Aris sees the face of the man in the white hat looking down. There is a pond with pink water lilies. A close-up of rough wood planks on a dock. A fish jumps up, sending a splash of water into the air. The man in the white hat mouths the words “I love you.”
The truth hits Aris with the force and strength of a speeding train. The copper helmet projects dreams . . . memories. Benja was right.
The strongest memories survived Tabula Rasa. His words echo in her ears. They live inside dreams.
Apollina pushes a button, and the images disappear to be replaced with another image of the man in the white hat. Aris’s heart drops to her stomach.
“What are you doing to him?” Aris asks, her voice quivering. She knows but needs to hear it.
“I’m using the Dreamcatcher to search, find, and destroy the harmful dreams. The ones with the victim he terrorized. They make Benja think he and the victim had a past.” The Interpreter scoffs. “A ridiculous thought. No memories survive Tabula Rasa.”
Aris feels ill. Images of Benja’s past are being systematically erased in front of her eyes. It is as if she is watching her friend in open-heart surgery. Pieces of him are being cut out.
“You erased his dreams.”
Apollina looks at Aris with a blank face. “That’s what we do.”
“But he didn’t want that,” Aris says. “I wasn’t aware that Benja had been receiving treatments from you.”
Not in a million years.
“Not all of our patients tell their friends. Some are embarrassed by it,” she says.
Aris feels tears threatening to drop. She leaves the room. She cannot bear to see her friend being robbed of his essence. Apollina follows behind her.
“Come with me,” the Interpreter says.
She takes her to a room overlooking the park.
“Sit. Please.” Apollina points to a white chair with a curved back.
Aris lowers herself onto it. Opposite her is a wall of seamless glass overlooking the green expanse of the park. It makes the room appear a part of nature. But instead of the peace it was designed to conjure, Aris feels trapped inside it. She knows the true purpose of this place. It exists to murder dreams.
From her seat, she can see the top of the giant trees that dwell in the forest at the bottom of the hill. It was only a few months ago she walked under its green umbrella with Benja. If only she could go back to that moment, before the blue crane and the madness, and hug him.
“Benja’s dreams were what caused him to act out in ways that threaten others. He’ll be better after this. It’s for his own and the greater good,” Apollina says.
The Interpreter continues, “Since you’re here, I’ll send him home with you. He will be incoherent for a few hours. He can follow simple instructions—sit, walk, lie down, and such. But more than that, and you will exhaust him.”
Aris looks away from Apollina to hide her disgust and shifts her gaze back to the park.
“He needs to sleep as soon as he gets back. You need to give him this to drink before he sleeps.”
Apollina puts a vial of clear liquid on the table in front of her and continues to rattle instructions.
“He won’t remember anything. When he wakes up, he may feel like he overindulged in alcohol. You are under strict instruction to not tell him about his experience at the Interpreter Center. The mind can only handle so much. You would only confuse him, and that may cause damage to his psyche.”
An alarm sounds. It reminds Aris of the noise an oven makes once it’s done cooking.
“He is ready,” Apollina says and gets up. “You may wait here; I will return with him.”
After the Interpreter leaves, Aris slumps into the chair. Tears pour down her face. All her fears have come true. Benja. The Interpreter Center erased his dreams.
What will happen to him now?
Her eyes catch a flash of brown under Apollina’s desk. Its familiarity pulls her like a magnet. She walks to the Interpreter’s side of the table. Without hesitance, she lowers herself to the floor and crawls under the desk and reaches for the leather briefcase.
In it she finds an exhaustive list of people, meticulously filed. Their names. Their faces. Their addresses. She sees an image of the angry man—the one she witnessed being led away by the police months ago—staring back at her. His name is Bodie.
Are these the Dreamers?
She flips through the papers with quicker speed. She finds one with Benja’s name on it. Her breath catches in her throat. She pulls it out and glances through. Her heart stops when she sees the name of the author of the
