The dream leads me along-I can’t change it, can’t stop it, can only complete it. Kathy sits down next to me, her knee almost touching my knee, and she cups her glass in both hands and slowly sways her wrists, watching the way the wine climbs up the sides.
“He wanted to take us away so he could hear us scream. That was the only reason he gave. He was going to kill us by driving metal stakes through our hearts.”
I sip at my beer, which I drank a lifetime ago. Casual conversation. Casual drinking.
“Crazy,” I tell her.
“The world is full of crazy people,” she says, and there’s that buzzword again. “If you hadn’t come along who knows what he might have done to me.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” I tell her, but of course I don’t need to. I would see it for real very soon.
“Nor do I,” she admits.
“Does Luciana live alone?” I ask, changing the subject.
She smiles a sad smile and takes a large sip of wine. “Her husband left her for a gym instructor. Hasn’t spoken to him since.”
“Must have been some woman.” My beer is cold and smooth and I’ve never felt like I’ve earned one so much. I’m not really a beer guy. I’m more a gin-and-tonic guy. But this may just be the best beer I’ve ever had.
“Some man,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“The instructor. Some man,” she says.
“Oh.”
She laughs the laugh of somebody who doesn’t know death has looked up her address and is en route.
“So what about you?” she asks. “You’re married I see.”
“Huh?”
“You’re wearing a wedding ring.”
I look down at my hand. I smile. I nod, then I shake my head. Then I stop smiling.
“That complicated, huh?” she asks.
“Isn’t it always?”
“It’s not meant to be,” she says.
“It is in my case. We broke up six months ago.”
“And you still wear the ring,” she says.
“Yeah. I keep meaning to take it off, but you know, it just doesn’t happen.”
“I do know. My marriage is over, but we’re still married. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” I tell her.
She starts to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I ask, and take another mouthful of beer.
“You’re going to murder me later on tonight, Charlie, and there’s nothing I can do about it-except laugh.”
I almost gag on the drink, surprised at her words, surprised that she knows death is close by, surprised she can make her laughter seem so real. That means the dream can change. That means nothing is set in stone after all.
“We have to-”
She interrupts me. “Really, it’s okay, because neither of us can change it now. I’ll be upset at first-and rightly so. You’re going to kill Luciana too. I really wish you wouldn’t.”
“I’m not going to kill either of you.”
“It’s a done deal, Charlie. Things will change. You will change. Think of it as character development. Now, where was I? That’s right, I was telling you about Luciana’s husband. Charlie? Hey? Are you still with me?”
“I’m still here,” I tell her.
“Charlie?”
The dream starts to fade and I call out to it because it has lied to me, lied about that conversation because it couldn’t have happened. Has it lied about anything else? I cry out, desperate for the dream to continue, desperate to see what I did next, but there’s nothing. I clutch my beer tightly, but can no longer feel the glass beneath my hands. The women are ghosts again, telling me to wake, to wake.
I wake as I woke yesterday, submerged in guilt and aware that the design of life is to be full of useless hopes. I feel more tired than before I fell asleep. I open my eyes and roll onto my side. Jo is staring at me.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she tells me.
“You look. .”
“Look what?”
Guilty, I think, but I don’t tell her. “Nothing,” I say.
“Are you going to untie me or leave me here all day?”
I sit up a little too quickly. The world darkens and for a moment I’m back in the dream-two dead women are waiting there for me-so I grip onto this world as tightly as I can and claw myself from the blackness. I untie Jo. It isn’t dark outside yet and won’t be for another couple of hours. I check the clock and see the alarm would have been going off in twenty minutes. I figure we may as well leave now. We need to get to my house before Cyris does, and I’m assuming he won’t get there until after sunset.
I don’t bother tying Jo back up. I look outside to make sure nobody is around, then open the door and quickly load our suitcases into the car before leading Jo to the passenger seat. She doesn’t struggle or complain.
The rain that came earlier has already disappeared. There are no clouds in the sky and the earlier breeze has died away too. You’d be crazy to think it had even rained. What is remaining is the dream. I can’t shake it. The other thing that is back is the headache. I hang my arm out the window. Jo rolls her window down too. It just keeps getting warmer. At this rate we’re on track for what the old guy on the radio said this morning.
We drive through town, and for the first time I’m able to see past the Garden City postcard image and see Christchurch for what it really is. People are getting killed here every few weeks. Last year it was the Christchurch Carver, then the Burial Killer, there have been bank robberies, revenge killings, people being thrown off roofs. It’s a building statistic that everybody seems to be keeping a secret. It’s becoming a part of modern-day life just like rising gas prices and global warming and terrorism, and we just sit back and accept it because nobody is showing us an alternative.
In the distance, on the Port Hills, the sun glints off house windows. Some reflect the sun and look like they’re on fire. Others look as though a giant tub of glitter has been spilled over them. Teenagers go up there at night in their souped-up cars and pour diesel over the roads so they can do burnouts and impress their friends before killing and dying-these are the boy-racers of the world, our next generation, and sometimes that scares the shit out of me. Some of these kids I teach. Some of them you know are going to make something of their lives-they’re going to do good, they’re going to help people or change the world, provide art and love and make little people with other good people-then there are those destined to hurt, to cause pain, to end up behind bars.
Daytime and the hills are filled with mountain bikers and paragliders and the husks of incinerated stolen cars, patches of landscape cordoned off with yellow police tape where some poor kid is getting peeled off the asphalt. It happens. It happened to one of my students last year. Speeding in cars was all a bit of a laugh. His friends, other students of mine, kept saying he always wanted to die young. That he died doing what he loved. That’s one of the dumbest phrases I’ve ever heard. He may have loved speeding, but I’m sure he didn’t love his car crushing all around him, didn’t love the fireball that burned flesh from bone. He didn’t love screaming. He didn’t die doing what he loved at all.
We reach the highway I was driving down when the Sunday night Old World collided with the Monday morning New World and created the Real World. Just after the turnoff I pull the car over by the pasture with the trees and the grass and the shallow graves that were meant to be. I kill the engine. The hot sun has burnt away most signs of the rain. We have enough light for maybe another hour.
“What are we doing here?” Jo asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken since we got into the car.
I nod toward the trees in the distance. “This is where it all happened.”
“You want to go in there?”
There are only a few cars on the highway behind us. I could probably dig a grave a few yards from the road and nobody would notice. Or care. I wonder how much evidence has been washed away over the last few days. A strong heat wafts through the window and it smells like mown grass. My clothes are sticking to me. Out there is a patch of ground that may or may not be covered in blood. Pieces of clothing are out there too. I had come along the other night, I had been a savior, a knight in shining Honda. Cyris had offered me to join in on the fun, but I wanted a different sort of fun.