Fragile Dreams Read online

  I write you though I know you won’t understand it any more than the rest, any more than I. I know you don’t want it. I put my heart into words because I have not the strength to put it back into the world. I’m weak. I’m a coward. I’m ashamed of myself and everything around me.

  Do with my thoughts what you will, what you want. Send my prayers back to the Christian God.

  No one is left to wonder what will become of us when we’re gone. Not you I, nor I you. I wonder if it would help if I told you I missed you.

  Okay then, I miss you.

  I miss you like I would miss a pleasant daydream I cannot fully remember. Was there sunshine? Was I happy?

  You are just that to me. A wonderful idea I had upon waking. An idea I will realize fully once aware, best left to a dream.

  What we follow will surface and you will know all truth. It is what we seek, what we have given everything to seek. And now we have failed, and that means nothing to you. But know that our failure is complete, with you and with the chase.

  You will never hear from me again. That is my gift. That, my son, is love.

  Matthew read it twice, then burned the pages in the fireplace. His grandfather never spoke of it. Matthew never forgot the words.

  Within the year his grandfather told him of his parent’s death. His parents who were not. His parents who lived a haunted life, and who haunted his own.

  * * *

  This city is a fairy-tale. This city is a skeleton, chipped away and faded to gray.

  Matthew knew he would never stop falling fallingfallingfallingfallingfalling through the abyss.

  He did not know how long he’d been asleep. His consciousness was frayed, slippery. Dying, he thought.

  Dying now. Dying.

  “No... uh, no...” he stammered, shaking his head, seeking will, seeking a spark. “Dee!” he yelled out, panic boiling inside him, the last torn threads of panic that comes with death. “Dee... Dee, please...”

  He heard her murmur, he heard her trying to dig through the rubble to find him, she was looking for him and her mouth was making a clicking sound that infected his thoughts with a fear so deep that he thought his heart would burst, his brain melt into syrup and drain away through his nose and ears.

  “DAMN IT, ANSWER ME!”

  And like that, it was all gone. The sounds of scraping, of something approaching him in the dark, of the visions of the morose landscape and empty sky. All gone.

  Just black.

  He touched his eyes with his fingers and felt their I’mreal solidity. He exhaled rattily, grateful for his broken nose because the smell of him was becoming rotten, and he was glad not to fully inhale the stench.

  He reached, tentatively, for Dee’s hand once more, if for no other reason than to prove he could return to sanity, and to a world—albeit painful—that was real.

  “I’d leave her alone, boy-o. You want nothing to do with that, believe me.”

  The voice had come from right next to him. Matthew jerked his head around, wide-eyed, and stared at the blank expanse. “Who’s there?”

  A hand rested on his shoulder. “Who do you think? That hot receptionist?” A pause, a frown in the dark. “Nah, she’s... well, she’s elsewhere. And trust me, she’s not so hot anymore.”

  Matthew’s mind spun. He rotated his shoulder as best he could and reached his hand slowly toward the sound of the voice.

  He touched flesh.

  A face, an unshaven cheek. He felt the cheek muscle flex—the face was smiling.

  “Don’t get fresh.”

  Matthew smiled, then laughed. He knew the voice now, somehow could see the features of its face through his fingertips. “Robbie?”

  “You are in a bad spot, my friend,” Robbie said, his hand caressing Matthew’s shoulder, then moving inexplicably to his side, where he was poking. He lifted the sport coat, slid his hand beneath, began feeling Matthew’s side through his dress shirt. He pinched his flesh.

  “Ow,” Matthew said, chuckling. “Jesus, dude.”

  “Sorry,” Robbie said, but he kept pinching, more lightly now.

  Matthew’s mind quieted, it was so very dark, but he thought he could, just barely, make out Robbie’s features. His skin had a slight glow to it. A silvery luminescence that reflected, repelled the dark. He was smiling, Matthew saw, and rested his fingertips on Robbie’s face.

  “God, I miss you, man,” he said, tears falling from his eyes. “I really miss you.”

  Robbie grabbed Matthew’s hand but his hand is under your coat and squeezed it. He leaned his head closer to Matthew’s, their foreheads almost touching. He smiled, and then whispered, as if it were a secret between them, as if avoiding a thousand nearby ears straining to overhear them.

  “I can get you out of here, Matthew,” Robbie said, his eyes bright and alive with mischievous joy. “I can save you.”

  Matthew shifted, brushed something away from his face, focused on Robbie’s eyes.

  “How?”

  Robbie smiled more broadly, laughing with secret knowledge.

  “Do you want to come?”

  Matthew’s smile faltered. Reason, or sanity, tried to break through the thick webbing that had spun itself around his mind. Robbie is dead, he said to himself, but the words carried no weight, no practical application.

  “Am I dead?” he said, genuinely curious. “Are you a ghost? A shadow of memory?”

  Robbie laughed mirthlessly. “No, man!” He gave Matthew a side-long glance. “You know, you’re acting a little weird.”

  “Yeah, well,” Matthew said, rubbing his swollen, stubby tongue with his fingers. “It’s been a rough week.”

  Robbie laughed again, sounding just like he did in the old days. Matthew wanted it to be the old days. He wanted to be back in college, sorting through their clothes in the communal laundry room, heading out to a party at an off-campus apartment they’d heard about through a friend or a neon-colored paper flyer.

  “I’m married now,” Matthew said, realizing his dead friend probably wasn’t aware.

  “I know,” Robbie said, “and I’m happy for you. I always knew you and Diane were going to go the distance.”

  Matthew waited, debating how much Robbie would want to know about his life. His mind drifted to his family. He tried to remember them. Diane. Little Robbie, the baby. His child. They’re lost, he thought. He drifted, his scalp tingling. White spots beat against his eyes like falling stars crashing silently by the hundreds, thousands... blinding light.

  Robbie pinched him again—harder this time—and it brought him back.

  “I have a son,” he said, trying to swallow, his throat too swollen, too dry. “We named him after you. I think I’m dying, buddy. I feel like glass. Like really thin glass...”

  Robbie’s smile faltered, he caressed the side of Matthew’s face.

  “They’re all with me now, Matthew,” he said quietly, his eyes wide and watery as black lakes. “I can take you to them.”

  Matthew’s mind began to buzz loudly, his skin began to itch, his body felt cold as ice. He thought the thumping of his heart was slowing down, an erratic drum beating his blood out and away into the sacrificial earth, which drank greedily.

  “Your mom and dad, they’re here, too.” Robbie shuffled closer. “They want to meet you. They’re really sorry, Matthew, and they said they love you. How great is that?”

  Matthew couldn’t process, he tried to understand but nothing was coming to the surface. “You can save me,” was all he could think to say, his eyes leaking.

  Robbie nodded. “Say the word, Matthew. Say the word and I’ll take you away from all this. I’ll bring you to Diane, to your son, your folks.” He paused. “I’m there too, bud. I’m there, too. God, even Stanley is there.”

  “That old man?” Matthew said, and they both laughed. Laughed like they had as kids, when they’d lay in a backyard tent and talk all night, trading handheld video games, looking at comic books with flashlights. Carefree, Matthew thought.
Nothing in the world but us. It was heaven.

  Robbie broke through his memories.

  “They’re coming, Matthew. We’re almost out of time.”

  Matthew was startled, shaken by the urgency in Robbie’s voice. He barely noticed that Robbie had slid a heavy hand beneath his shirt, was burrowing into his belly with a wiggling force.

  “Who... who’s coming?” he asked.

  Dee. What about Dee? he thought, but didn’t know if Robbie could save her.

  “There’s a woman here...” he said.

  Robbie’s face fell. He heard movement from where Dee lay. A wild, scrambling sound, like she was suddenly fighting through the rubble to reach him. Matthew debated reaching out for her.

  “Matthew,” Robbie hissed.

  Dee was speaking, saying something in haughty, choked sounds, a language that Matthew did not recognize. He heard her grunting, cursing, writhing. She was breaking through.

  Matthew turned away, reached out, found Robbie’s warm hand waiting for him.

  Something heavy was crawling up his legs. He shifted his weight, tried to turn and see, but he’d lost control of his muscles and could only lie there, flipping his head side to side.

  “What the fuck is that!” he screamed, bile surging to his throat.

  “Relax, relax,” Robbie said, caressing his head. “It’s your son. It’s little Robbie. He’s here.” Robbie looked down where Matthew could not see, where it felt like a hundred small hands were pawing at his legs and back, reaching for him, tugging at him incessantly. A thousand desperate fingers ripping him away.

  “He wants to be with you,” Robbie said. “It’s really quite adorable.”

  Matthew smiled at this, relieved. His son. He was here. Little Robbie was here. A miracle.

  Robbie moved his face closer, tilting Matthew’s chin to look at him. Matthew looked.

  “Robbie?” Matthew croaked, his head flat against the concrete block that served as his death-bed pillow.

  Robbie’s eyes were bursting supernovas.

  Something long, cold and wet slithered around Matthew’s neck and squeezed, the tail of the thing flicking against his dry lips and crusted facial hair.

  “Yeah, buddy?” the thing called Robbie said, his face exploding into light.

  The hands were racing across his body, patting him, pinching him, slipping inside his clothes to reach flesh. His throat was being squeezed more and more tightly. A second cold scaly tendril slid down his collar and moved across his chest like wet midnight. His guts were a flurry of movement, a voracious bubbling dance of tiny bodies fighting to be inside him. He wanted to reach for Dee’s hand one last time and was devoured by an incredible regret that he could not help her. But his hand would not move, his body’s controls had been snipped away from the commands of his mind as neatly as a cut string.

  “Robbie…” he mouthed, although little sound came out, just a trickle of ashen crimson drool and the ghosts of words tucked inside a weak billow of hot sour breath.

  “Save me.”

  Chapter 9

  Jim was the first one to see the hand.

  The search dogs had been barking like it was the end of the world, but the team knew at this point they weren’t looking for survivors. They were looking for bodies. Still, it was important to keep protocol and not rush things. No point in anyone getting hurt trying to free a corpse. That, and if they were still breathing in all that mess, Jim thought, dropping his cigarette as he watched the crane wheel into position, its bent metal arm swinging a hook the size of a small child, well, they’d likely prefer it the other way ‘round.

  The engineers had found an especially ugly slab of concrete—a structural pillar, one of them had announced with a grimace—lying atop a pile of what used to be a small office building. The building had stood two doors down from the bank Jim went to when cashing his check on Fridays. He’d walked by the building at least once a week for the last three years and he’d never noticed it, not until it was reduced to a pile of ruins by the second-worst earthquake in California history.

  Thousands dead, all across Los Angeles and the Valley region. Highways had twisted and collapsed, buildings fallen in on themselves, explosions, fires, death everywhere. Jim and his team had been told to focus on assisting Burbank Police and Fire with the clearing and salvaging, and they’d been doing it around the clock going on almost four days straight. Jim hadn’t seen his family in all that time, sleeping on work sites, the giant sulfur work lights replacing the moon outside the smeared windows of run-down construction trailers. The purr of diesel generators were a constant white noise that had a similar effect as ocean waves when you were tired enough, at least that’s what he told himself.

  The dogs, however, did not get much chance to sleep.

  They were walked in four teams of six-hour shifts, around the clock, twenty-four hours a day, trained to sniff out flesh, bark when they sensed a body.

  They barked plenty.

  Over the last few days, Jim’s team had found a total of thirty-seven souls at six separate sites. Of those thirty-seven, Jim figured around ten would live to see their next birthday. And half of those would be forever disfigured, a few horribly so. That’s what was under all this destruction, all the crushing weight of concrete versus flesh and bone, the remains of a lost battle in which the frail bodies of man stood no chance.

  When the dogs began their morbid barking, Jim had been smoking and studying the blue-pink peaks of the Verdugo Mountains, praying for a night of quiet as the red sun blazed in the west.

  But damn them, they had called for him again. Didn’t even get to Amen, he’d thought sourly.

  Jim walked over as the engineer grappled the giant crane hook to the eye nut and cable they’d so gingerly drilled into the slab. The men all stood back and the dogs snarled and Jim yelled for them to be pulled back. The hoist creaked as the chain ratcheted slowly upward, servos straining against the immense weight.

  The slab lifted, and the first thing Jim noticed was that it wasn’t a flat slab, or a pillar, but a bearing pad with three feet of column still hinged to it. No, it wasn’t flat under there at all. It had a fat projecting middle. Which decreased the odds for whoever was down there rather significantly.

  Jim stepped forward first, as was protocol.

  That’s when he saw the hand, and the man it was attached to. Based on where that man’s body lay, the protrusion of the concrete pad must have been settled quite neatly into the square of his back.

  Likely crushed him on impact, Jim thought, and spat.

  * * *

  “Medics in now! Swing that slab, Tom,” he yelled, pointing at the large chunk of concrete hovering over their heads. “Swing it the fuck out of here.” When it was safely rotated away from the rescue crew, Jim took two steps closer to look at the man’s body, and knew he was long gone.

  As the medics ran up behind him, Jim studied the surrounding debris and saw a flash of something else.

  “We got two of ‘em,” he barked, yelling for the ambulance to drive up. One of the men asked if he’d need two ambulances, and Jim shook his head. He looked back toward the site, where the medics were rushing up the side of a wall of debris to inspect the man.

  “There’s a dress,” he yelled at them. “A blue dress, right there. You see?”

  One of the medics nodded and Jim turned, not wanting to see this part, his job done for now.

  Two women in yellow jumpsuits ran by carrying a long wooden backboard painted bright yellow but stained and scuffed with blood and death.

  More goddamn corpses, he thought, sad and tired. How many more days, he wondered, how many more hands would he see lifting themselves from the twisted skeleton of their newly broken world?

  He turned and looked at the pink-stained jagged peaks and grimaced, hating their solidity.

  * * *

  Matthew’s first sensation when being pulled back to consciousness was that the horrible weight on his back was gone. The second thing he notic
ed was the noise.

  Was that... dogs? he wondered, somewhere in the soft fuzzy nowhere of his working mind. And machines?

  Then, VOICES.

  Matthew felt warm sunshine on his face, and his eyelids glowed so fiercely he was terrified to open them, fearing the severity of the open sky would blind him forever. Then, as if by some miracle he was too far gone to fully appreciate, there was someone there, squatting next to him, talking to him, asking him questions.

  Matthew didn’t open his eyes, but he turned his head toward the voice. He opened his mouth and tried to say that Yes, he could hear them and Yes, he was very much able to acknowledge that he was alive, if only they could help him up and perhaps get him some water.

  Oh, and for the record, he thought numbly, I’m, well, pretty badly hurt. He wasn’t sure how bad, but it was bad, and he preferred not to dwell on it. He also wanted to apologize for the vomit and shit and piss and blood that had been spat from his body in different ways, at different times.

  What came from his mouth was more of a groan, and a breathy hiss.

  “Jesus Christ, this guy’s alive!” a man yelled, a young man’s voice. He sounded thrilled, and Matthew felt so good that he was alive, hallelujah boy-o!

  “Listen, mister, we’re gonna get you help, okay?”

  Matthew heard another voice, this one from a little further away, as if he were standing over his body, looking down at him.

  “Gary, his foot! Christ.”

  There was a scramble of activity. Cases were being unclasped and something pinched into the inside of his arm. Hands were on him now, and he could hear the sounds of his suit being cut off his body.

  “Sir, my name is Gary, and I’m here to help you,” the young man said, his voice breathless and excited. “We’ve given you an IV which will get you fluid, okay?”

  The voice was so assured, so positive, Matthew felt instantly better, safer. He wished he could have nodded in agreement, but that didn’t seem possible at the moment.