“Big bucks, huh?” the Hispanic said wryly, glancing at his partner, then down at the woman, who continued to gaze imploringly at Veil. Finally the man shrugged. “Come on, buddy. Keep your money. Mama here obviously wants your company, and I guess you’ve earned the right.”
Throughout the short ride to the hospital the woman gripped Veil’s wrist with her free hand while Veil spoke to her soothingly in English. At the hospital, where he was known, he arranged to have the woman and her child admitted for postnatal care and observation. He left a credit card at the desk, walked to another part of the building, then used an electronically coded key card to gain entrance to a private elevator that took him to the top floor. He exited, walked to his right and through a swinging door marked Sleep Research Laboratories. In a small, dimly lighted office on the right a woman with long blond hair and dressed in a white lab coat sat with her back to him as she monitored an array of instruments on a console before her and made notes on a yellow legal pad. Beyond her, behind a glass panel, three men and a woman lay sleeping on cots, wire leads running from their heads, arms, and chests.
“Good day, Dr. Solow,” Veil said quietly, moving up behind the woman and placing his hands gently on her shoulders.
“Veil!” Sharon Solow said without looking around. “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to the Whitney to supervise the hanging of your show.”
“Something came up — or out, actually — and I had to take a detour. Since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d drop in and say hello.”
“I’m glad. I’ll be right with you. I want to notate this data while it’s fresh. I think I may have resonance here; all four subjects went into REM at virtually the same time.”
“How’s the kid with the night terrors doing?”
“Much better, thanks to you. He’s using the techniques you taught him to simply roll away from the dream and go back to Stage Two sleep, or dream himself someplace else. Most of the time he goes someplace else, because he knows you do that. He idolizes you.”
“Where does he go?”
“Disneyland, mostly.”
“Sounds like a good choice to me. Free admission, and he doesn’t have to wait in line for the rides.”
“Veil, what’s that smell?”
“Probably blood and placenta.”
Now Sharon Solow spun around in her chair, and her mouth dropped open when she saw the stains on his shirt front and jeans. “Veil, what happened?!”
He grinned. “I delivered a baby on the subway platform a little while ago. Mother and baby doing very well downstairs, thank you. But I need to get cleaned up before I go to the museum. I could have gone home, but I seemed to remember I have a change of clothes here.”
“You always have a change of clothes here, love,” Sharon said, squeezing his hand. “You go wash, and I’ll join you when I finish here.”
Veil showered in the locker room reserved for the laboratory’s test subjects, then toweled off and started to dress in clean clothes. Sharon appeared in the doorway as he was slipping on a denim shirt. She came over and helped him button it, then kissed him. “Thank you, love,” she said softly.
“For what?”
“Just for being you. For being our baseline research subject and authority on vivid dreaming, and for helping all the other vivid dreamers who come here looking for help because they can’t handle it like you do. And, of course, for coming through the Lazarus Gate to save my life.”
Veil smiled thinly. “It took me a long time to find a way to bring you back; you were in a coma for almost three years. To my knowledge, you and I are the only two people who have actually gone through it and come back. And you can never do it again. I couldn’t help you. You’d stay dead.”
Sharon whispered, “I’m aware of that, Veil. No more machines and drugs. Ever.”
“You miss the CIA funding?”
“Do roosters crow in the morning? Of course I miss the CIA funding. But I don’t miss the CIA. We make do.”
“And they still don’t know what happened?”
“Not a clue. And they’ll never know — unless either you or I tell somebody, and I’m no more likely to do that than you are.”
“Good.”
“There,” Sharon said, helping Veil put on his sports jacket and plucking off an imaginary piece of lint. “That’s a great artist’s costume. Are we still on for dinner?”
“For sure.”
“See you later, love.”
Veil dreams.
Vivid dreaming is his gift and affliction, the lash of memory and a guide to justice, a mystery and sometimes the key to mystery, prod to violence and maker of peace, an invitation to madness and the fountainhead of his power as an artist.
Veil arrived at the hospital at noon the next day with flowers and a basket of baby clothes only to be told by the nurse at the reception desk that the Chinese woman and her child were gone. As Veil stared at her uncomprehendingly, the nurse quickly added, “An elderly Chinese gentleman with a lawyer came for her this morning; they’d called the ambulance service to see where she’d been taken. The old man was very polite, and the lawyer had papers showing that the woman was his granddaughter.”
“You’re sure of that?”
The woman behind the desk flushed slightly. “Well, the papers were in Chinese, but everything seemed in order.”
“Jesus Christ,” Veil breathed, his eyes suddenly flashing blue fire. “Sir, I was with them when they talked to her.”
“In Chinese?”
“Yes, sir. But the woman offered no resistance. She seemed perfectly willing to go with them.”
Veil sighed. “That nice old Chinese gentleman and his lawyer probably told her they’d bury her baby alive and kill her family in China if she didn’t go with them willingly.”
The blood drained from the nurse’s face. “What?”
“Never mind,” Veil said curtly, placing the clothing and flowers on the desk. “It’s too late to do anything about it. Give these to some other patient.”
He returned to his loft and worked feverishly, trying to put the mother and baby out of his mind and center himself.
Thousands of vultures of unspeakable cruelty and injustice circled the city day and night, and the fact that the wings of this particular dark bird had brushed his face did not mean there was anything he could do to track and bring it to ground and rescue its prey. The woman and her baby were lost, almost certainly untraceable, beyond his help.
The attempt to blot out rage and memory with canvas and paint did not work, and he finally gave up the struggle. There were still debts that he owed, and he felt he did not have the right to refuse to at least try to repay them when the opportunity arose.
In late afternoon he washed out his brushes and walked over into Chinatown to buy a bird.
Veil dreams.
He is Archangel, the CIA’s most efficient and ruthless operative in their secret war in Laos. He gathers intelligence by acting as liaison to the anti-Communist Hmong tribes in the mountains, but mostly what he does is hunt and kill the enemy. This is war, and so he is rewarded for his murderous bent and skills. But he kills not out of love for country, but for himself. Violence is a need. It will be many years before he learns to control the vivid dreaming that is at the root of his battle with insanity and finds both redemption and healing in painting his nightmares. Now it is only extreme violence that holds in check his personal demons and allows him to find rest in the occasionally savage dreamworlds of his nights.
Despite the fact that he is constantly teetering on the edge of madness, he does not lack feelings of intense loyalty to, and even love for, the people of these mountain villages he has armed and fought with. Now he is particularly concerned about the safety of one particular tribe, for he has been spotted and recognized by the Pathet Lao on a trail close to the Hmong village. He kills four of the guerrillas and escapes from the others by leaping from a tall cliff into a raging river where he loses consciousness and floats downstream for some distance before finally being washed ashore. It is after nightfall when he regains consciousness. Dazed and cold, he nonetheless immediately begins the arduous climb up out of the gorge, for he knows that he must warn the villagers that they will be suspected of collaborating with Archangel, and all will be made to pay the price.