Dagger Key and Other Stories

After interviewing everyone on Abi’s client list, you conclude that if Reiner is correct in his assertion, if she’s crippled six other men aside from him, five of them must be the five who have moved away from Seattle, because—except for Sessions—none of the rest qualify. Accepting Reiner’s thesis that he was Abi’s mistake, those five men plus Sessions plus you equals seven, the same number as Abi’s tattoo…yet according to Sessions, it’s not a backwards seven, it’s Chof, thus the number seven is irrelevant. Maybe it’s both a seven and a Hebrew letter. Maybe an upside-down L, too. You can’t fit all the details into a single theory. Angels, sevens and Hebrew letters, time, empty aquariums, Abi transforming men into cripples, the end of the world, etc.—you consider the possibility that one or more of the details may be extraneous, and if you removed it from the mix, the rest would cohere. That’s the crux of your problem. Your witnesses are unreliable. Reiner’s vituperation and Sessions’s nervous evangelism equally nourish your capacity for doubt and serve to cast everything you yourself have witnessed in a shaky light. You can’t tell how much to keep of what they’ve said and how much to throw away. Confronting Abi won’t provide an answer. She’ll only dissemble, or she’ll speak the truth and you’ll mistake it for dissembling.

You finally come down with whatever it is you’ve been coming down with and are dog-sick for two weeks, debilitated for several days thereafter. Abi nurses you through the illness, a consolation for which you’re slavishly grateful, but your gratitude is tempered by the dreams that accompany your fever. In their basic architecture, they’re similar to the dream you had about your son, the fish—you’re crippled, bedridden, but instead of occupying an apartment, you’re in Abi’s house. From those fundamentals, the dreams diverge wildly in character and have different endings, some ordinary, some dire, some ecstatic, some perplexing. Especially memorable is a dream in which Abi proves to be a mental patient escaped from an asylum in the future, and has come back to the twenty-first century to save the planet, but bungles the job. In one, she assumes the role of an alien, a member of an invasion force bent on destroying the environment; in another, she’s a sexual demoness, a spirit named Lilith devoted to torturing young men; in another yet, she’s a Gaian incarnation with noble intentions and extraordinary powers. In the remaining two dreams (there are six in all, seven if you count the one with the fish) she’s the Abi with whom you’re familiar, a human female. In the first of these, she makes your life hellish with her psychotic fits, eventually setting fire to the house and incinerating you both; in the second, she nurses you back to health, you walk again, and the two of you embark upon a life of accomplishment and good works.

The dreams are exceptionally vivid and too organized to be typical expressions of your subconscious, but you don’t concern yourself with them until they begin showing up in rerun, variants of each repeating night after night (except for the nightmare about the fish, which never resurfaces). The most significant variant elements are the endings: the dream about the time traveler, for instance, ended badly the first time, but ends well in rerun. The aquarium, Rem and Mike, and other facets of your life with Abi figure in all of them to one degree or another. You wonder if Abi’s responsible for the dreams, if she’s gotten into your head that deeply. But then you imagine that you may be on the wrong track altogether. Suppose you and she are at the center of a cosmic hiccup, an eddy in time, a branch poking up from the surface, disordering the flow, that must be cleared before the temporal stream can resume its customary race? The way the dreams are circulating in your head lends a physical resonance to this idea and you have the sense that you’ve given up your destiny to a game of musical chairs; when the music stops, you’ll be stuck with one of six possibilities. In essence, if not in actuality, you’ll wind up with a well-intended madwoman from the future, an ordinary psychotic, a seeker after truth, an alien, a sexual predator, or a goddess. It’s ridiculous, you think. Yet each of these roles signifies a color you have assigned to Abi’s character at some point or another, and you can’t avoid the feeling that one of your dreams will come true.