Dreamer

Kendi’s mouth opened and his eyes went wide. Then he screamed.

Ben dropped his fork. Similar howls went up all over the restaurant. Several people, all of them wearing the medallions and rings that marked them as Children of Irfan, fell to the ground and curled into a fetal position. Every one of them was screaming. The people who weren’t howling, about half the population in the room, stared in stunned amazement.

Ben forced himself to move. He leaped to his feet, knocking his chair over, and rushed around to the other side of the table. Kendi continued to scream. Ben grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Kendi!” he shouted over the din. “Kendi, what’s wrong?”

But Kendi didn’t seem to hear. Ben cast about, not knowing what to do. The other unaffected restaurant patrons were similarly confused. Like Ben, some tried to help. Some sat in dumbfounded astonishment. Others bolted for the exit.

A woman scrambled to her feet and ran toward the glass doors that opened onto the restaurant balcony, her gold medallion glittering on her chest. The doors were closed but the woman smashed straight through them. Crying and bleeding, the woman reached the edge of the balcony and leaped over the edge. Her sobbing scream faded into the mist.

Ben slapped Kendi’s face and shouted his name, but Kendi still ignored him. A young man snatched up a steak knife. He slashed at the veins on his wrists, and blood splashed over his table. A waiter wrenched the knife away from him. The screaming continued, a roar that pounded at every square inch of Ben’s skin.

And then Ben felt it. A slight, subtle twist in his head. He was abruptly so alone, so achingly, horrifyingly alone. It was as if the people around him didn’t exist. A lassitude dropped over him like a heavy blanket. Just standing beside Kendi’s chair cost great effort. It took some time before he noticed that the screaming had stopped. The waiter dropped the bloody steak knife. The quiet was deafening, but Ben didn’t care. Kendi put his head down on the table. He was sobbing like a child. So were most of the other Silent in the room. The non-Silent stood or sat around looking tired and apathetic. Scarlet blood dripped in a steady flow from the wrists of the young man. Ben shook himself. This wasn’t right. He should do something.

Ben took up a napkin from his table and went over to the bleeding man. He bound the bleeding, unresisting wrists as best he could. Every motion cost him effort. It was like his clothes were made of iron. He went back to Kendi, who was still crying quietly.

“Come on,” Ben said. “We have to go.”

He hauled Kendi to his feet and lead him out the of the restaurant. The air was brisk and the mist was heavy. Soon full summer would come, bringing gentle rains and warmer temperatures. For now, however, everything was chilly and damp. Sounds filtered through the distance-distorting mist. Ben heard weeping and shouting. A single scream rang out and abruptly hushed itself. An empty gondola coasted by. The lonely feeling welled up in Ben so strongly that tears gathered in his eyes. Kendi seemed impossibly far away, even though Ben’s skin was touching his.

Ben forced himself to keep moving. The monastery felt like a war zone after the bombs had stopped falling. People wept on the walkways or stared in shock. Some moved around trying to help, but it clearly took them a lot of energy to do so. Once they passed the body of a boy who had knotted a rope around his neck and jumped off a branch. The corpse swung gently at the end of the creaking rope.

Somehow, Ben managed to get them back to his house and up all the stairs to his front door. He let Kendi drop to the couch. Ben collapsed beside him, exhausted. Clutter had already piled up-clothes, disks, computer parts. The room was warm, however, and Ben tried to soak in the feeling. He felt detached, even uncaring. Bandaging the bleeding man and bringing Kendi to the house had been acts of reflex. There had been no emotion behind them. At last, Ben turned to Kendi.

“Kendi, what happened?” he asked. He had to shake Kendi’s shoulder before getting a response.

“I can’t feel the Dream,” Kendi answered hoarsely. “I can’t feel anything at all. It’s horrible, Ben. I don’t-”

There was a pounding at the door. Kendi fell silent. The pounding came again. Ben blinked, then found the energy to go and open the door. Harenn stood on the landing, her veil drawn haphazardly across her lower face.

“You have seen everything?” she said without preamble.

Ben nodded. “Kendi’s pretty bad. Some people committed suicide. I don’t know what to make of it.”

“When you saw the people who committed suicide,” Harenn said, “it did not much bother you, did it?”

“No,” Ben answered automatically, then realized what he was saying. It hadn’t bothered him. The boy who had hanged himself couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. The image should be haunting Ben, even make him ill. But Ben simply couldn’t feel worked up about it.

“Yes,” Harenn said, echoing his thoughts. “Other people are of small interest.”

“Why not? What’s going on?”

“I will come in, first.” She brushed past Ben and came into the house. It hadn’t occurred to Ben to ask her inside. In the living room, she surveyed Kendi, who was still on the couch. “For the first time,” she said, “I believe I am glad not to be Silent.”

“What’s going on, Harenn?” Ben asked. “Do you know?”

She shrugged. “I have an idea. The darkness that everyone speaks of in the Dream has engulfed Bellerophon.”

Ben sat down heavily on his weight bench. “You’re sure?”

“It would make the most sense. I have witnessed many Silent in aparthy, just as Kendi is. They have been dealt a terrible shock.”

“Kendi says he can’t feel the Dream,” Ben said.

Harenn nodded. “Exactly. He has effectively been struck deaf and blind. The non-Silent are affected, too because our minds make up the Dream itself, but we are not as sensitive to it. We can therefore function, though it is difficult.”

“You don’t seem affected at all.” Ben had to force every word and his body felt as heavy as the weights stacked in the machine behind him. Kendi stared bleakly into space.

“I learned to cope with deep depression long ago,” Harenn said softly.

A problem stirred in Ben’s mind. He tried to focus on it, but the effort was costly. Slowly, like a bubble rising through quicksand, it came to the surface.

“What,” he asked, “about Mom?”