was one that she’d been having on and off for more than twelve years, since before Olaf, the dog, had found his way to her:
She is ten years old, asleep in her bedroom at the rear of the bungalow in Corona del Mar. She does not thrash or whimper, but across her softly illumined young face pass tormented expressions.
Abruptly she sits up in bed, though this awakening is part of the dream in which she still resides. In response to three shrieks of a night bird, she throws back the covers and steps to the window.
In the courtyard, lit by only the grin of a Cheshire moon, two mysterious robed and hooded figures, tall and shambling, carry a rolled rug, moving toward the garage apartment. Visibility is poor, but Bibi intuits deformities in their limbs and spines.
When she realizes that the rug is in fact a corpse wrapped in a shroud, she knows they must be returning the dead man to the place of his demise. As though it feels the weight of her stare, one of the bearers of the body turns its head to look at Bibi where she stands at the window. She expects a dimly visible skull within the hood, the classic countenance of Death, but a worse revelation awaits her. The night brightens somewhat, as if an immense solar flare has bloomed on the farther side of the planet, reflecting fiercely off the crescent moon. The hood keeps more secrets than the better light reveals. But before the intruder turns away from her, she sees something that she cannot abide; the glimpse so terrifies her that she does not—cannot, will not—carry the image with her into the waking world, but instead confines it to the world of sleep, forgotten or at least repressed.
For the second time in the dream, young Bibi sits up in bed, breathless, trembling, chilled to the marrow. When she switches on the lamp, she discovers the shrouded burden that the hooded creatures had been carrying. The wrapped figure sits in a corner chair, for the moment still. Then it squirms in the confining shroud—and speaks.
The third time Bibi sat up in bed, she was awake and no longer a child. By repetition, the nightmare had lost much of its power years earlier. She no longer cried out on waking or trembled. But the skin creped on the back of her neck, and a thin sweat cooled her brow.
As on other such occasions, a rough voice followed Bibi from the dream, speaking words out of context: “… is everything.”
The voice was always the same one, but it did not repeat the same words every time. Sometimes he said, “supreme master” or “so sadly to seek,” or “the word was,” or scraps even more mystifying.
The other hospital bed remained empty. She was alone.
The ambient glow of the suburban sprawl laid a yellow faux frost on the window. Above her headboard, the lamp by which she’d written her impressions of the day was at its lowest setting, bright enough only to allow proper care when the nurse looked in on the patient.
The dream, which had been frequent when Bibi was ten, occurred less often as the decade passed. Now it came once or twice a year.
In the early days, she’d thought it might be predictive. But it was a dark fantasy that could never unfold in the real world.
Entering adolescence, she sometimes brooded about the persistent dream’s possible symbolic content. Because it recurred so often back then, she also wondered if she might be disturbed, psychologically unbalanced, as in crazy-waiting-to-happen. But no. No, that was the worst kind of young-adult-novel hokum: tragic young girl hiding her tri-polar psycho-paranoid true-werewolf nature from the world and from herself until she has a breakdown the very day before she would have been voted the Most Popular Girl in Ninth Grade and would have been kissed by the cutest bad-boy rebel in school. Even at that young age, she was remarkably self-possessed, confident of her right to be in the world and her ability to make her way on her own terms.
Now she dismissed the dream for what it surely always had been: nothing more than proof that finding the body by the dinette table had been traumatic—the abundance of blood, the blind and drooling eyes, the mouth gaping in a silent cry.
The bedside clock read 3:49 A.M. In little more than six hours, she would receive a diagnosis from her physician. She had no reason to fear Dr. Sanjay Chandra, just as she had no reason to fear the bearers of the dead in a dream. There were no boogeymen. She would be well, all would be well, all manner of things would be well.
Reclining once more, her head upon her pillow, she closed her eyes. She told herself where she would be a day from now, a week from now, a year. Soon she slept again, and this time her sleep was not sullied by a nightmare.
When the seizure struck Bibi, her body spasmed on the bed, and from her throat issued thick wordless grunts. The episode was mild and brief, however, and it did not wake her.
One Moment of Truth Among Many
ROOM 456 HAD THREE CHAIRS FOR VISITORS. They were cheap and only as comfortable as they had to be for the name chairs to apply.
Dr. Sanjay Chandra didn’t want to loom over Bibi as she lay in bed, reporting on her health from a superior height. He placed two chairs by the window, and they sat facing each other, with blue sky and scattered white clouds to Bibi’s right, as if she were receiving this news in the foyer of Heaven.
In spite of wearing a white lab coat over iron-gray suit pants, a pale-blue shirt, and a blue tie, and although he had arrived carrying an ultrathin laptop with which he could evidently access all Bibi’s test results, Dr. Chandra had none of the intimidating presence that was natural to some physicians and cultivated by others. Soft-spoken, with an air of serenity that suggested that he had made peace with this world of endless frustrations and with his own ambition, he seemed less like a doctor than like a counselor of the troubled.
In preparation for this meeting, Bibi had taken a shower, brushed her long, dark hair, applied makeup, and donned a sapphire-blue silk robe over her pajamas. If the physician had bad news to deliver, she intended to receive it with style, to appear in no way pitiable or in the least defeated.
The diagnosis proved to be bad indeed, her prognosis even worse. A year to live. A year of decline and suffering.
She knew now why Dr. Chandra had wanted to speak to her alone. Neither her mother nor her father possessed the emotional fortitude to watch her receive this news. Her reaction, no matter how stoic, would have undone them, and Bibi would have been too concerned about them to remain focused on her options as single-mindedly as she must.
With the gentleness and compassion of a caring chaplain in a death-row conference with a condemned man, Dr. Chandra explained why Bibi was without good options. Her cancer was far advanced. Even caught early, gliomatosis cerebri was too dispersed in the brain for surgery to be a permanent solution. At this stage, chemotherapy and radiation would gain her little time, if any. “And the side effects will make the days ahead harder, Bibi. Much harder, I’m afraid.”
“No offense,” she said, “but what about a second opinion?”
“I asked Dr. Beryl Chemerinski to provide one. She is a highly respected surgical oncologist at another hospital, with no connection to me. She concurs with my conclusions. I wish she didn’t. You can do chemo and radiation nevertheless. Only you can make that decision.”
She
