Chapter 4
That night I fought through a dream.
After it was over, looking back the next morning, I recognized it as lucid dreaming.
I knew it was a dream but I didn’t know I knew it.
I watched myself both inside and from the outside, and I felt my head expanding and the experience felt fuzzy, like I drank too much, but I could recall the events far better than most, and match them up word for word with the event from my past.
I was sitting on a plane, on a flight to Italy.
A private jet. Rich leather seats. The cabin was too large, but dimensions in dreams were flexible.
I wore handcuffs, including a fancy medical bracelet that was activated remotely.
All the lights on it glared red. A young physician named Meg held the remote control but she wasn’t on the jet.
Neither was the hired muscle, a European named Ernst. They should’ve been but they weren’t, and in the logic of the dream that made sense.
The only other passenger was Emile. She sat across from me smiling like a predatory cat.
She was somewhere between thirty and forty-five, hard to tell.
Her face was heart-shaped and attractive, firm and youthful.
Dark hair, piled in an updo to match her evening gown.
I remembered her as one of the prettier people I’d ever met but, on the dream plane, her plastic surgeries had twisted her face.
“I’ve heard the stories about you,” she said. “The mighty Mackenzie August.” Her accent wasn’t American. The R sound was more of an HRH roll and she sustained the E.
“The stories are greatly under reported,” I told her.
“I heard you pulled poor Dexter’s throat out of his chest.”
“I had to,” I said.
Her eyebrow arched. “You do not lack for confidence, Inspector August.”
“Never had cause, Mrs. Moneybags.”
“The fabled Mackenzie August, in chains. I have been to the Gabbia Cremisi, the cage fighting. My husband, he can make extra money by selling your services to the women,” she said.
I watched myself work at the medical bracelet but it only tightened.
Outside the window, the world looked like a bleak nothing.
Emile stated something about her husband and I understood that this dream was nearly a word-for-word replay of an actual conversation that took place between me and Emile, but not exact.
Some details were forgotten or repressed.
Here, in my mind, Emile held a gun, which hadn’t been the case on the real private jet.
I tried talking to myself but I couldn’t, like my dreaming mouth was sewn shut.
“Your sexual services, you understand. Some women, they are excited by caged monsters. A man in chains, who otherwise might kill her, but instead she gets to enjoy. What could be better?”
“Almost anything,” I said. “Like Ronnie and my son.”
“Have you read the Bible, Inspector August?”
“I have.”
She said, “One of the curses at Eden, Eve will desire control over her husband. Did you know that? But the Bible says man will rule over her because she’s smaller.
Less of a curse and more of a prediction, no?
A man like you is big and strong, and women want to control that power.
It gives the woman pleasure—manipulating the man against his will. Did you know this?”
“Not very woke, Mrs. Moneybags.”
“Inspector August—my husband will kill us both if he finds me with you.”
“I’ll try to restrain myself,” I said.
In the dream, the cockpit door opened. Ronnie was fighting with the controls, like she was a pilot, calling for help. She held Kix in her lap. Emile sipped from a cocktail and threw the rest at me, and I jolted upward in bed.
My bed.
The dream was over. Ronnie shifted beside me in the dark.
“Just a dream,” I whispered out loud, to make sure the nightmare was over.
I didn’t have many nightmares, not since leaving Los Angeles.
My shirt was damp so I tugged it over my head and dropped it on the floor and breathed in the cool air of the room like it was medicine.
Part of me felt like I was still strapped to the seat in the jet, and part of me knew I was safely under the covers in my house, and the clashing environs made me feel dizzier.
I stood and walked to the bathroom and drank water from the sink and rubbed some into my eyes and I blinked until they were blurry, then wiped my face with a towel.
The guy in the mirror looking back at me was me. No dream.
“You’re okay,” I told him.
I nodded. “I know. We’re okay.”
I returned to bed and Ronnie asked if I was okay, but she was asleep and asking reflexively, and I laid my hand on her head. Slowly the dream was replaced by gratitude and I slipped away again into better sleep.