The boys squirm in pain and try to pull away. After a moment, I let them go. Lesson learned. They let each other alone for at least a minute or two.
In my dream, their pain doesn't hurt me the way it always did when we were growing up. Back then, since I was the oldest, I was held responsible for their behavior. I had to control them even though I couldn't escape their pain. My father and stepmother cut me as little slack as possible when it came to my hyperempathy syndrome. They refused to let me be handicapped. I was the oldest kid, and that was that. I had my responsibilities.
Nevertheless I used to feel every damned bruise, cut, and burn that my brothers managed to collect. Each time I saw them hurt, I shared their pain as though I had been injured myself. Even pains they pretended to feel, I did feel.
Hyper-empathy syndrome is a delusional disorder, after all.
There's no telepathy, no magic, no deep spiritual awareness.
There's just the neurochemically-induced delusion that I feel the pain and pleasure that I see others experiencing. Pleasure is rare, pain is plentiful, and, delusional or not, it hurts like hell.
So why do I miss it now?
What a crazy thing to miss. Not feeling it should be like having a toothache vanish away. I should be surprised and happy. Instead, I'm afraid. A part of me is gone. Not being able to feel my brothers' pain is like not being able to hear them when they shout, and I'm afraid.
The dream begins to become a nightmare.
Without warning, my brother Keith vanishes. He's just gone. He was the first to go—to die—years ago. Now he's vanished again. In his place beside me, there is a tall, beau-tiful woman, black-brown-skinned and slender with long, crow-black hair, gleaming. She's wearing a soft, silky green dress that flows and twists around her body, wrapping her in some intricate pattern of folds and gathers from neck to feet. She is a stranger.
She is my mother.
She is the woman in the one picture my father gave me of my biological mother. Keith stole it from my bedroom when he was nine and I was twelve. He wrapped it in an old piece of a plastic tablecloth and buried it in our garden between a row of squashes and a mixed row of corn and beans. Later, he claimed it wasn't his fault that the picture was ruined by water and by being walked on. He only hid it as a joke. How was he supposed to know anything would happen to it? That was Keith. I beat the hell out of him. I hurt myself too, of course, but it was worth it. That was one beating he never told our parents about.
But the picture was still ruined. All I had left was the memory of it. And here was that memory, sitting next to me.
My mother is tall, taller than I am, taller than most peo-ple.
She's not pretty. She's beautiful. I don't look like her. I look like my father, which he used to say was a pity. I don't mind.
But she is a stunning woman.
I stare at her, but she does not turn to look at me. That, at least, is true to life. She never saw me. As I was born, she died. Before that, for two years, she took the popular "smart drug" of her time. It was a new prescription medicine called Paracetco, and it was doing wonders for people who had Alzheimer's disease. It stopped the deterioration of their in-tellectual function and enabled them to make excellent use of whatever memory and thinking ability they had left. It also boosted the performance of ordinary, healthy young people.
They read faster, retained more, made more rapid, accurate connections, calculations, and conclusions. As a re-sult, Paracetco became as popular as coffee among students, and, if they meant to compete in any of the highly paid pro-fessions, it was as necessary as a knowledge of computers.
My mother's drug taking may have helped to kill her. I don't know for sure. My father didn't know either. But I do know that her drug left its unmistakable mark on me—my hyperempathy syndrome. Thanks to the addictive nature of Paracetco—a few thousand people died trying to break the habit—there were once tens of millions of us.
Hyperempaths, we're called, or hyperempathists, or sharers. Those are some of the polite names, And in spite of our vulnerability and our high mortality rate, there are still quite a few of us.
I reach out to my mother. No matter what she's done, I want to know her. But she won't look at me. She won't even turn her head. And somehow, I can't quite reach her, can't touch her. I try to get up from my chair, but I can't move. My body won't obey me. I can only sit and listen as my fa-ther preaches.
Now I begin to know what he is saying. He has been an indistinct background rumble until now, but now I hear him reading from the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, quoting the words of Christ:
" 'For the kingdom of Heaven is as a man traveling into a far country who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto One he gave five talents, to an-other two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.' "
My father loved parables—stories that taught, stories that presented ideas and morals in ways that made pictures in people's minds. He used the ones he found in the Bible, the ones he plucked from history, or from folk tales, and of course he used those he saw in his life and the lives of people he knew. He wove stories into his Sunday sermons, his Bible classes, and his computer-delivered history lec-tures. Because he believed stories were so important as teaching tools, I learned to pay more attention to them than I might have otherwise. I could quote the parable that he was reading now, the parable of the talents. I could quote several Biblical parables from memory. Maybe that's why I can hear and understand so much now. There is preaching between the bits of the parable, but I can't quite understand it. I hear its rhythms rising and falling, repeating and varying, shout-ing and whispering. I hear them as I've always heard them, but I can't catch the words—except for the words of the parable.
" "Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same and made them another five talents.
And likewise he that had received two, he also gained an-other two. But he that had received one went out and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.' "
My father was a great believer in education, hard work, and personal responsibility. "Those are our talents," he would say as my brothers' eyes glazed over and even I tried not to sigh. "God has given them to us, and he'll judge us according to how we use them."
The parable continues. To each of the two servants who had traded well and made profit for their lord, the lord said, "
'Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.' "
But to the servant who had done nothing with his silver talent except bury it in the ground to keep it safe, the lord said harsher words." "Thou wicked and slothful servant...' "
he began. And he ordered his men to, " 'Take therefore the talent from him and give it unto him which hath ten talents.
For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have in abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.' "
When my father has said these words, my mother van-ishes. I haven't even been able to see her whole face, and now she's gone.
I don't understand this. It scares me. I can see now that other people are vanishing too. Most have already gone.
Beloved ghosts....
My father is gone. My stepmother calls out to him in Spanish the way she did sometimes when she was excited,
"No! How can we live now? They'll break in. They'll kill us all! We must build the wall higher!"
And she's gone. My brothers are gone. I'm alone—as I was alone that night five years ago. The house is ashes and rubble around me. It doesn't burn or crumble or even fade to ashes, but somehow, in an instant, it is a ruin, open to the night sky.
I see stars, a quarter moon, and a streak of light, moving, rising into the sky like some life force escaping. By the light of all three of these, I see shadows, large, moving, threatening. I fear these shadows, but I see no way to escape them. The wall is still there, surrounding our neighborhood, looming over me much higher than it ever truly did. So much higher.... It was supposed to keep danger out. It failed years ago. Now it fails again. Danger is walled in with me. I want to run, to escape, to hide, but now my own hands, my feet begin to fade away. I hear thunder. I see the streak of light rise higher in the sky, grow brighter.
Then I scream. I fall. Too much of my body is gone, van-ished away. I can't stay upright, can't catch myself as I fall and fall and fall....
************************************
It's three in the morning now, but last night, just after dark, some group, some gang, perhaps, attacked the Dove-tree place just north of us. There were, yesterday at this time, 22
people living at Dovetree—the old man, his wife, and his two youngest daughters; his five married sons, their wives and their kids. All of these people are gone except for the two youngest wives and the three little children they were able to grab as they ran. Two of the kids are hurt, and one of the women has had a heart attack, of all things. Bankole has treated her before. He says she was born with a heart defect that should have been taken care of when she was a baby.
But she's only twenty, and around the time she was born, her family, like most people, had little or no money. They worked hard themselves and put the strongest of their kids to work at ages eight or ten. Their daughter's heart problem was always either going to kill her or let her live. It wasn't going to be fixed.
Now it had nearly killed her. Bankole was sleeping—or more likely staying awake—in the clinic room of the school tonight, keeping an eye on her and the two injured kids.
Thanks to my hyperempathy syndrome, he can't have his clinic here at the house. I pick up enough of other people's pain as things are, and he worries about it. He keeps want-ing to give me some stuff that prevents my sharing by keep-ing me sleepy, slow, and stupid. No, thanks!
So I awoke alone, soaked with sweat, and unable to get back to sleep. It's been years since I've had such a strong re-action to a dream. As I recall, the last time was five years ago right after we settled here, and it was this same damned dream. I suppose it's come back to me because of the attack on Dovetree.
That attack shouldn't have happened. Things have been quieting down over the past few years. There's still crime, of course—robberies, break-ins, abductions for ransom or for the slave trade. Worse, the poor still get arrested and inden-tured for indebtedness, vagrancy, loitering, and other
"crimes." But this thing of raging into a community and killing and burning all that you don't steal seems to have gone out of fashion. I haven't heard of anything like this Dovetree raid for at least three years.
Granted, the Dovetrees did supply the area with home-distilled whiskey and homegrown marijuana, but they've been doing that since long before we arrived. In fact, they were the best-armed farm family in the area because their business was not only illegal, but lucrative. People have tried to rob them before, but only the quick, quiet burglar-types have had any success. Until now.
I questioned Aubrey, the healthy Dovetree wife, while Bankole was working on her son. He had already told her that the little boy would be all right, and I felt that we had to find out what she knew, no matter how upset she was. Hell, the Dovetree houses are only an hour's walk from here down the old logging road. Whoever hit Dovetree, we could be next on their list.
Aubrey told me the attackers wore strange clothing. She and I talked in the main room of the school, a single, smoky oil lamp between us on one of the tables. We sat facing one another across the table, Aubrey glancing every now and then at the clinic room, where Bankole had cleaned and eased her child's scrapes, burns, and bruises. She said the at-tackers were men, but they wore belted black tunics—black dresses, she called them—which hung to their thighs. Under these, they wore ordinary pants—either jeans or the kind of camouflage pants that she had seen soldiers wear.
"They were like soldiers," she said. "They sneaked in, so quiet. We never saw them until they started shooting at us.
Then, bang! All at once. They hit all our houses. It was like an explosion—maybe twenty or thirty or more guns going off all at just the same time."
And that wasn't the way gangs operated. Gangsters would have fired raggedly, not in unison. Then they would have tried to make individual names for themselves, tried to grab the best-looking women or steal the best stuff before their friends could get it.
"They didn't steal or burn anything until they had beaten us, shot us." Aubrey said. "Then they took our fuel and went straight to our fields and burned our crops. After that, they raided the houses and barns. They all wore big white crosses on their chests—crosses like in church. But they killed us.
They even shot the kids. Everybody they found, they killed them. I hid with my baby or they would have shot him and me." Again, she stared toward the clinic room.
That killing of children. . . that was a hell of a thing. Most thugs—except for the worst psychotics—would keep the kids alive for rape and then for sale. And as for the crosses, well, gangsters might wear crosses on chains around their necks, but that wasn't the sort of thing most of their victims would get close enough to notice. And gang-sters were unlikely to run around in matching tunics all sporting white crosses on their chests. This was something new.
Or something old.
I didn't think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back to the clinic to bed down next to her child.