She sidesteps the question slightly. “We’d have to look at fundingcycles, decide whether to make an interdisciplinary application. That’s if you’re happy for me to share your information with my colleagues, make some initial inquiries?”
“Yes,” I say dully. But though I came here to ask for it, I feel strangely wrong-footed by the idea of scrutiny. Like I’ve been trapped somewhere dark for so long, I need easing into the dazzle of daylight. I try to refocus. “So... you think you might be able to help?”
After all these years, I’m still not sure I dare believe it.
Diana leans back in her chair as far as ergonomically possible. Bafflingly nonchalant, she glances again at her notes. Taps the tip of her pen against them. “Well, that depends on what you mean by help. Evidently we can’t change the future for you. But perhaps we could do something with the dreams themselves.”
“You mean, stop them happening?”
“At this stage, I really couldn’t say.” She clearly won’t promise something so outlandish as restoring me to normal.
A thought toboggans through me. I’ve been so fixated on preventing the dreams, I’ve barely stopped to consider what that would actually achieve.
Because if Diana can’t help Callie, is there even any point? Ever since I dreamed about her death, it’s Callie I’ve been worried about. Not my own jumble of lopsided brain cells.
“Something I haven’t asked,” Diana’s saying. “Does anyone in your family share your... condition?”
Inside my mind, a key begins to turn. “I... I’m not sure.”
“I’d like to run through your family history as a starting point.”
My breathing becomes rigid, mechanical. Why hasn’t this occurred to me before now?
I’m not even your father!
“Actually,” I say suddenly, shutting my notebook and getting to my feet, “don’t share this with anyone just yet. I’d like some time. To think everything over.”
“Take all the time you need.” Her tone implies she’s got a ton of other research on her desk that she’d frankly find far less of a ball-ache.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
“Give my regards to Steve,” she says. But I’ve already disappeared.
•••
I walk back through the concrete maze of the university campus toward the car park. The place is eerily quiet, except for the whistle of an autumn breeze between the buildings.
Questions are strobe-lighting through my mind.
I’ve been focused on finding a cure for so long that I’ve never stopped to think about what would follow. Maybe cutting off my dreams would leave me worryingly adrift. Like the implausible anti-climax of a lottery win, the fingertip fear of a house offer accepted. Be careful what you wish for.
Because maybe what I’m actually wishing for is a way to stop the future from happening. And no academic in the world can help me with that.
The only person who can do that is me.
61.
Callie
On the same day as Joel’s appointment with Diana, I have a near-miss at work. A plastic felling wedge springs from a tree I’m helping to cut down just as I’ve lifted the visor on my helmet. Thick and squat, like a doorstop but sharper, it misses my face by millimeters. Any closer and I could have been blinded—or worse, if it had struck me in the neck. It’s a stupid, careless error and it rattles me.
I wonder if I’ll always be jumpy, now that Joel’s dream has alerted me to my own mortality. Maybe this is what it’s like for stroke or heart attack survivors—forever afraid a tight chest or headache is the beginning of the end. Perhaps it will always be there now when I wake in the morning—that caged bird in my stomach, a small but insistent quiver of fear.
I must be young when the end comes, I’ve realized that. I can tell from the intensity of Joel’s distress. A vision of me dying gray-haired and weary-boned, peacefully in my sleep, would hardly have tormented him to the degree he’s now experiencing.
I run through all the ways it might happen—being crushed by a tree or falling from the shoulders of one I’m felling, drowning, suffocating, a clot or a tumor, a smashing of bones... I wonder if there is pain, and whether Joel is there, and wherethereis...
Closing my eyes briefly, I attempt to steady myself.Stop. You’re just in shock. This agitation will pass. The fear will fade.
